Parameters Shared Between Parts

Jordana,

Use a notebook for shared parameters.  Search the help pages for "notebook".

The notebook is declared to the parts, and the shared parameters of the notebook are available in the parts.

Regards,

Dan N.

This really depends on your intent.  "Notebooks"/"Layouts" do "work" - but they create "baggage" (dependency) when it comes to reuse of the same item(s) in other designs. 

If you are doing this specific to a design.  One way would be to use Pro/PROGRAM to require an input parameter to each part then "execute" a change to the parts from another Pro/PROGRAM in the assembly they are in.  But this depends on how deep/separated they are from each other (same level in the assembly tree - or one higher/lower than the other in the assembly structure.

The Session/Component ID reference via an assembly relation does work - but it is not pretty to look at or understand later (comments are your friend). 

Hope that helps.

Dave

My method for doing something very similar is to create another part file with nothing but a co-ordinate system (used for assembly purposes) & 100's of my parameters. This 'parameter part file' is present in all my assemblies & drawings & controls all my part dimensions & relationships between part dimensions. It took a lot of work as i have lots of parameters but it works very well.

Good luck!

John 

Here's a discussion of a similar situation and my responses.

Top Down Design Discussion

A brief summary: I use what I call master assemblies to drive designs. I use an assembly not as an collection of parts positioned as a mechanism or whatever, but as a "factory" where I build the individual part models. The driving sketches, overall parameters, and all that stuff is done in the assembly.

As mentioned in the discussion, it would probably be more convenient or "proper" to use something like Notebook or Advanced Assemblies, but we don't have those modules and probably never will.

First, thank you everybody! I'll give some of those a try.

Thanks, dnordin. I will take a longer look at these. Notebooks appear to be a legacy thing that's been cobbled into current workflows, but it appears to be the best that a multi-million dollar CAD powerhouse can do to manage shared dimensions between parts (sarcasm aside, the ability to use shared parameters is generally good design practice for reuse, so I would hope that PTC takes notice and makes this easier in future versions).

DavidBigelow, I have also noticed from research on notebooks that they create some difficulty in reuse. The Pro/PROGRAM approach would probably work, but I want to link parts that are not necessarily in the same assembly, so it would be isolated part-to-part sharing. I've also found the session/component ID reference to be unreliable, and easy to break. Especially if I want to also reference that parameter in MathCAD or do parametric studies on it in Simulate.

@John.Pryal, I'd be interested in a little more detail on how you do this. I am somewhat new to Creo, and haven't quite figured out how to pull out parameters from other parts in the model consistently. Would you be willing to share a little more about this, and maybe include a little example? Or help me know what to research in the PTC help stuff to figure it out. I also really like this approach.@John.Pryal

@KenFarley, I really like this approach as a general solution that will work for everybody. Thanks for sharing this!

If you are new to Creo and have not investigated the use of Layouts you should take look and determine if it would work for you. Layout is not mentioned much these days as I think PTC wants to sell Matchcad to fill that functionality but it can be used to great effect in controlling design intent. Some methods being proposed here create external references and may not be optimal for what you need to do.

See my response in another thread with a simple example showing how it can be employed.

Layout example