Create a note from a UDF family table information.

[B_Baker]

I have a UDF that creates threaded internal holes.  In the UDF family table exists all the information that is needed to create a note on the drawing for describing the thread, depth etc.  Is there a way to create a note from the table columns without having the user select each dimension?

Note should read as below:

     1/4-20 UNF-2B

     Major Dia.: .5000

     Pitch Dia.: .4565/.4500

     Minor Dia.: .4340/.4170

What I would like is an annotation to be created when the thread UDF is ran.  The UDF may be ran several times on one part & this is the reason to need it created as the UDF is ran.  This way the user can show/erase the annotations and reduce the chance of errors.

[Chris3]

I don't know the exact answer to your question. Seems like there should be a way to construct a note that calls out those parameters. The note would need to be placed in a annotation feature for it to come through in the UDF. 

I am responding mostly to warn you of a bug with UDFs though. When you call out &thickness and thickness = .100 what comes through in the UDF is text that reads .100 NOT the &thickness. So if the .100 changes to .150, the text in the UDF will still read .100. Be aware of this. I contacted PTC and they said its working to specification and not a bug 🙄. I haven't have time to type up the "idea" to fix this yet. My workaround is to put "thickness" in the UDF and then instruct my users that they need to add the & in front of thickness and then it works.

[B_Baker]

There has to be a simple way to make this work.  All the info is already there as a parameter.  The users would just throw tantrums if they had to do that much work, so I'm trying to automat it.

I would think that a regen should fix the thickness issue, but I also have heard many times. 'not part of Creo functionality'.

Thanks for the reply.

[Chris3]

I don't use GD&T advisor but I know it can create annotations. I think there is a configuration file that can be setup with it. I would look into that.

The issue with &parameter is not a regen issue. Its an issue with the way the programming was done. PTC programmers convert any text added to a dimension to a string value instead of passing through the parameter reference (&parameter). There is no current fix for that.

So if you constructed a note that was something like this:

&Description
"Pitch Dia: " &pith_dia_min & " \ " &pith_dia_min

Instead of all of that coming through in your UDF note you would get this as plain text:

1/4-20 UNF-2B

Pitch Dia.: .4565/.4500

I should say that I only worked on UDFs where I was adding parameters to a dimension. Its possible that if this is a leader note that leader notes don't have this issue. You would have to test yourself.

[B_Baker · Accepted solution]

Finally figured it out!

Had to add the NID info for the Annotation to make it work properly to get the thread text.  Gave up on the tolerance display but have now also figured that out.  Was trying to show all as numbers.  The only way I found to make it work was to use text.