Flat Pattern Instance AND correct Orientation

[neilgullage]

I am in the process of transferring thousands of Solidworks parts over to CREO 5 and trying to create a macro that sets material and converts to Sheet Metal for us.  So far so good with that, but in order to create the Flat Pattern as part of the Macro it requires a face to select as the correct Orientation.  I'd like to automate that as well if possible but the top face of the flat pattern could be different for each part, so I'm wondering if there is a way that at time of creating the Flat Pattern "Rep" the correct orientation could be saved as well?

In the Flat Pattern Preview window it automatically positions the view oriented towards the flat face, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to have it use that view and save it as a new Orientation.

For anyone helping me with this to understand what I am doing here, after the Flat Rep and correct orientation is created I then have a macro generate a new drawing (for Flat Pattern only) using a template that places the flat pattern rep at scale 1:1 and saves the drawing.  This is for the Windchill CADWorker to automatically generate a dxf file for our suppliers to access.

[Pettersson]

So by "macro", you mean mapkey, correct? And am I right in assuming you want this to run completely without user interaction? That's tricky. I played around a bit but couldn't find a way to make it work. you'd think that defining the orientation from inside the flat pattern preview window would work, but no. And there doesn't seem to be a way of automatically selecting the predefined fixed surface (so you could define the view from that surface).

The best bet I had is simply have the macro put the part in for example the "top" orientation, define the fixed geometry (in model properties) and click in the middle of the window. Then use the "view normal" command and click again in the middle of the window. But then I tried that, and the mapkey automatically pauses and waits for you to click. Didn't it use to record the screen coordinates for the click? Hm, tricky.

[neilgullage]

Yes Mapkey is correct.  My time with SolidWorks hasn't left me yet lol...

The idea is minimal user interaction... We have a lot of parts to change over.  We have tied in some python scripts and even trying out the trail files to help us, but we are stuck at generating reliable flat pattern views that work for every part.

If this isn't possible, they should certainly add the ability to save a rep AND orientation while in the Flat Pattern preview to save us time in placing flat pattern views in future releases!