Creating datum features in Pro program

[JG_14095744]

Hi everyone,
I'm currently working on a project in Creo 12 where I want to use pro program to optimize and partially automate the design. For this, I would need to be able to automatically generate different amount of datum planes depending on the input and I need to place components in the assembly contrained by those planes. Is their a way of doing this in pro program? If Yes, can someone tell me how. It would help a lot.

[tbraxton]

Maybe, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze. Pro/Program does not support looping functionality as exists in most programming languages, so this type of thing becomes convoluted when reducing it to practice. For looping and other functions, you would need to use one of the other APIs like Pro/Toolkit which costs extra and is not easy learn.

With Pro/Program you would be able to create a part with the max number of datums that would possible be needed and then use logic to suppress or delete the unneeded planes when running the program. I don't think this is what you have in mind.

Would all of these planes created be constrained to the same parental references and created the same way? For example, would all of them be just an offset distance from a default datum in the start part? Explain what control you need over each datum as it is created and the max # of datums you would expect would be created. With that information someone may offer a better approach to automate this without going to an API for custom programming.

[JG_14095744]

Thank you so much. I indeed already found some problems with the limitations of the Pro/Program language.

So the Input of the system will be the amount of building blocks. I want to build the system so that the datum planes are all based on the same parental reference and that the distance to the parental reference is increasing with each building block. 

I tried it now with placing everything in advance and controlling/suppressing the features with the Pro/Program and it seem to work but I'm worried that the limitations of the methodology will become dominant when I increase the complexity of the model.

[tbraxton]

"...the datum planes are all based on the same parental reference and that the distance to the parental reference is increasing with each building block."

Based on the statement above, I would attempt to create a pattern of the datum plane such that you then have a parametrically driven number of planes defined in the pattern. Using this approach, you can save the model with 2 planes and then use it as a start part to define any required # of planes to support the assembly of n # of blocks. I would consider creating a skeleton model to define these planes used for assembly constraints and then placing this in your assembly such that you can attach the blocks to the datums and parametrically control the # of datums and blocks in the assembly as required.

Refer to this thread to see an example of incrementally stepping used with relations to modify geometry of a part. It may be useful in understanding how one can work around the lack of looping available in Pro/Program.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/3D-Part-Assembly-Design/How-to-create-multiple-shapes-with-relation-for-a-burning/m-p/618846