Creating a relation within drawing that uses a drawing parameter

[acoote]

I am trying to create a relation within my drawing that recognizes what type sheet I am using and creates a variable based off the sheet size. I have ran into a problem however where when I open the relations editor within my drawing it will only "Look in" my assembly to find parameters and the parameter for my sheet size is a drawing parameter. Can anyone help with this?

Thanks,

Alex

[TomU]

Drawings can't have relations like parts and assemblies can.  The best you can do are repeat region relations (very limited) or drawing programs (also very limited.)

[acoote]

Basically we are trying to put a note on a drawing parametrically when we export to pdf and have it be centered at the bottom of the drawing. Since we create drawings of multiple sizes we need to be able to parametrically place the note based on what size drawing (stored in a drawing parameter) we are using.

Can you think of a workaround for this?

[MartinHanak]

Hi,

if you use drawing templates for creation of drawings, then you can place a table containing &format parameter on requested location and hide it using layer. During PDF export, you can unhide layer.

[TomU · Accepted solution]

I think the answer may depend on how you are creating the PDFs.

If this is a manual process (directly from Creo), then Martin's approach would probably make sense.  You could also create a series of mapkey to automatically create the note, export to PDF, and then delete (or hide) the note.  In this case you would make one mapkey for each sheet size and then just call the correct one.  (pdfa, pdfb, pdfc, etc.)

If PDF creation is an automatic process (like additional files generated during publishing by Windchill), then I would recommend you consider something like Fishbowl's LinkAccess solution.  We use this to watermark PDF's during publishing with the lifecycle state, approver's name, and approval date.  The software does allow you to create separate recipe files by sheet sizes, state, etc.

[acoote]

This is what we are going to do at least for now. I have created 4 mapkeys to place our stamp in 4 different absolute coordinate positions and we just have to select the right mapkey for the right size drawing. This will work well enough but if we could still somehow have one mapkey that would recognize what the sheet size is and place the stamp in the correct position based on that information that would be ideal.

Alex

[dschenken]

You can do this using software - I would expect JLink can, but AutoIt, AutoHotKey, and VBA for MS Office can all be pressed into service.

So far PTC has not embedded a general purpose programming language into the drawing or model files or provided for the ability to do so. I don't know if that's a good move or not, but it does lower the odds that someone will write a macro that runs when a part opens and takes over your computer, so be careful what you wish for.