Model Based Enterprise

In Creo 4.0 one of the significant enhancements was to provide advanced capabilities for standalone annotations of the following types: Geometric Tolerance (GTOL), Datum Feature Symbol, Datum Target and Dimension. In this blog post, I'll provide a little bit of background to explain the differences (up through Creo 3.0) between standalone annotations and annotation elements owned by an annotation feature. Then I'll explain in more detail the enhancements in Creo 4.0 and I'll finish up with some advice on when you might want to consider using either standalone annotations or annotation elements owned by annotation features.What is a standalone annotation and how is it different from an annotation element inside an annotation feature?A standalone annotation is an annotation that is not "owned" by some other feature in the model. These annotations are listed in the model tree under the Annotations node.Annotation elements, by contrast, are owned by another feature in the model. Typically

Standards-based GTOLs in Creo 3.0 and earlierIn Creo 3.0 and earlier we used to have a config.pro option called 'restricted_gtol_dialog' that would restrict access to various options in the GTOL dialog based on what was allowed or disallowed according to the GD&T standards. Effectively this option would prevent you from creating an "illegal" combination of symbols in a GTOL by disabling some of the UI components based on the options previously selected. For instance, the datum reference fields were disabled for Flatness tolerance since Flatness does not allow datum references per the standards.While in general this functionality had some benefits, there were also a number of problems associated with it:It sets the expectation that the Creo software has a comprehensive understanding of the standards and that any GTOL you were allowed to create was "legal" and, conversely, anything that you were prohibited from doing was "illegal" according to the standards.There was no way to indica