Regeneration errors in Merged Parts/Assemblies?

[LawrenceS]

For many years my company has been using a merged part in order to simplify and represent an actual manufactured Sub-Assembly (S/A). The problem we are having with this is when one of the base parts change the merged part does not update unless it is checked out and manually regenerated. Not only is this time consuming but it is easy to forget until working on the top level asm that won't regenerate because of the un-regenerated merged part. Ignoring the regeneration error is tempting but depending on the nature of the change that could render the top level asm inaccurate. I am not sure of a way around this, which leads me to the following questions:

1) Does anyone use merged parts to represent sub-assemblies or for any other reason? If so, are you able to avoid the frequent regeneration errors that come up because the merged part does not update automatically? If so, how?

2) Does anyone have any ideas on how to avoid these regeneration errors, or a setting to tell ProE to always update the merged part, without having to manually check it out?

3) Besides using merged parts, does anyone know of a better way to represent a simplified asm as a part and without regeneration problems?

We are using version ProE 4.0.

Thank you in advance!

[LawrenceS]

Joseph,

Thanks for letting me know about this config option. I will try it at next opportunity.

I just want to verify, when you tested it, were you using Windchill/PDMLink with the merged part checked in?

Thanks! I will repost after I experiment with this.

(As an FYI, it may not be right away because we are in the process of upgrading to Creo and there is a lot going on...)

[LawrenceS]

Thanks again for the suggestion Joseph, but unfortunately it did not work for me in PDMLink. I did the following:

• Found 5 Sub-Assembly parts that are not regenerated due to the merge features.
• Set the config option Retrieve_data_sharing_ref_parts yes,
• Restarted Creo,
• Opened all 5 .prt files in session.

None of them showed green lights. They all show yellow and unregenerated status. So it didn't work for me.

It seems that the reason this didn't work is because it does not address the fact that the objects that I want to update are checked in PDMLink and at a locked/Released state. The above was done with the other config settings regenerate_read_only_objects YES

If I did something wrong, Please let me know what to try differently. Otherwise, does anyone else have any suggestions?

[LawrenceS]

After all these years of investigation, community discussion, and support calls, I realized that the only reason this is a problem is that Windchill/PDMLink does NOT fully support the Merge feature.  That is the ultimate problem because outside of PDMLink this works fine.  It is the rigorous demand that everything be checked out and updated with permission and revision control that actually causes this issue.

Since we are still having this issue I am going to try putting this out in the product idea section and will include a link here once I do.  Thank you everyone for your help in trying to solve this and find an alternative method.

Lawrence