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I am working on a military project were all parts are required to have certain parameters assigned to them, one being UNIT_WEIGHT. After assigning a density to a part, what do I need to do to have the weight parameter automatically populated?
I believe you just need to add a relation UNIT_WEIGHT=MP_MASS(") and have the parameter set up with that name, UNIT_WEIGHT, as a 'real number' for type and driven by the relation. The drawing cell would just have to have the '&UNIT_WEIGHT' entry to populate. Hope that helps. mb
For Wildfire 4, the paramter is still MP_MASS, but this may not always be the best way to get the weight of the part. I used to use this in all of our start parts, but I found that sometimes you needed to regenerate your model once or twice to get the mass calculated properly. After searching around a bit, I found David Haigh's ProE Admin 101 presentation from the 2010 PTC/User conference and started using his suggeted method.
For this, you first assign a material to the part. Next, you create a mass properties feature in the model and move it to the footer (this way it is always the last feature to regenerate. You then add a parameter for your mass in the mass properties feature, assign it a unit, and add a relation (<new parameter="> = mass). You can then call this paramter in a drawing in the following: &<new paramter=">:FID_<mass properties=" feature=" name=">.
The benefit of this method is that no matter what units the model is set to, you will always get the same units out of the feature parameter as what you set the parameter to. So, for example, if you set the feature parameter to be MASS_KG and set the unit to kg, then even if the model was set to calculate weight in pounds, the MASS_KG parameter will always be in kg.
Attached is a copy of the instruction set that was created for the engineers in my department here, in case anyone is interested in a step-by-step process.
-Lawrence
In Reply to Jonathan Hodgson:
Small correction: on recent versions of Wildfire, at least, I believe
the current 'internal' parameter / function name is PRO_MP_MASS (with no
brackets or quotes required).
If you don't have mass_property_calculate set to automatic, you'll need
to do Edit -> Setup -> Mass Props; Generate Report... before the
relation will be valid.
HTH,
Jonathan
That pdf is a good clear explanation on having the model automatically calculate the Mass upon regen, but I hope you have a mapkey to go with it as this is an excellent example of how making long repetitive processes into mapkeys can save a lot of time!
David,
That is exactly what I did with our start parts (we upated our start parts and drawing templates when we moved to Windchill recently). This document was for the rare ocassion when someone would open an old part and wanted to revise it into the new format.
-Lawrence
In Reply to David Haigh:
If you look at my ProE Admin 101 talk, you see that for new parts you don't have to have a mapkey. You can put this into the start models.
ProE Admin 101 talk.
http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/do/sd/sid=1144&type=0
There are 71 pages to the powerpoint and a few movie files. Down load all the files and unzip them in the same directory so Powerpoint can find them. You need to view the presentation as a slide show. If you print it out to read, you will have a lot of graphics overlapping the text. There are links in the slide show to various files. There is also good information in the notes for each slide. So you will want to check out the notes view also.
David Haigh
Thank you for the link, David. After reading the earlier post, I was going to do a search for your presentation.