"New" in workspace

[cmarquardt]

I am curious if anyone has any good workarounds for parts that are "new" in your workspace, but already exist in windchill commonspace.

An example of this would be-

Day 1: Vendor sends you a .STP of a large assembly file. You import it as an assembly, save it, and check it into commonspace.

Day 2: Vendor sends you an updated version of the large .STP file. You import it, save it, and

(FYI: my example is a little more simple than the exact situation we have going on, and I cannot simply add the "day 1" model to workspace and get those parts updated in that manner.)

Thanks!

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[jwagh]

Here is my "trick" (I'm using Windchill 9.1 and Wildfire 5/Creo Elements)

1. Keep new version in your session (opened in ProE)


2. Use the ADD button in your workspace to bring back the old files from commonspace to your workspace. Make sure you uncheck 'Reuse content in target workspace' - this gets rid of your error but brings the old version back. IMPORTANT - when ProE asks to update your items in session with those files it just brought into your workspace, select NO. This way you have the old items in your workspace, but your new ones still in session.


3. Save your items in session back to your workspace - this will flag the items as modified and you can now check it in as the next iteration.

[cmarquardt]

Right, I can usually make that work too. My complication comes in like this:

Lets say the vendor has sent us 10 similar assemblies over the past few years. Each one is very large, and they all have some common parts.

Assembly A uses parts also in assembly B, C, E, and H. But B,C,E, and H may or may not share components wiuth eachother.

Trouble is, maybe I dont know what E and H were called when they were checked it (it could have happened years ago). And,I don't even know about B and C's existance.

And I am not talking about a total of 20 or 30 components when I say large; I mean upper triple digits, so I can't just start performing a where used report on everything either.

What has happened in the past is putting a date stamp on the assemblies and just rolling with the huge amount of repeated data and wasted space. But I am trying to find a better way around it, and maybe there just isn't.

[TomU]

To some degree it depends on whether you are used to working with the “as stored” configuration or the “latest” configuration. With “as-stored”, you can pretty much overwrite whatever you want because the new versions will be ignored when opening older assemblies. On the other hand, if you typically work with “latest”, then it’s probably too risky to try to reuse the data. There is no way to know if the same component in the original assembly is compatible with the usage in the new assembly. Likewise, you can’t just bring in the new components and overwrite the old ones because you may very well be breaking old assemblies.

Updating vendor supplied data is no fun, especially if this is actual CAD data vs. some neutral format (like STEP). Trying to import CAD data from vendors who don’t have Windchill is a nightmare. Invariably there are duplicate family tables, tons of missing references, ghost objects galore, and all kinds of other issues that Windchill simply won’t allow. We’ve actually given up on importing one of our vendor’s data and just left their stuff on a shared network folder.

It’s kind of long, but below is the series of steps I developed to deal with importing vendor data. The specific steps you’re referring to are highlighted in yellow.

Tom U.

[mdebower]

Colten,

Have you tried using the Import to Workspace functionality? You should be able to tell Windchill/Creo to use the existing Windchill versions or to overwrite them…

-marc

[BillRyan]

Here are options I’m aware of and each one has benefits and disadvantages:

1) Rename all the new parts with the conflict in your workspace to a new name. (not ideal by any means)

2) Create a shrink-wrap of the assembly and manage it as a part instead of an assembly. We’ve got a supplier sending us 50 assemblies with 200 parts in each one. There may be 6 updates to these 50 assemblies within 6 months…it is not efficient to expect the engineer to manage 60,000 objects.

3) Have the supplier send you native cad objects and use the import function in the workspace instead of pushing the files into the workspace using the “save” transaction from Creo. The import function in the workspace gives you options to manage the new objects with same name already existing in CS.

4) And finally, this is the process I have used many times to get users out of trouble when they have a bunch of new objects/same name exist files.

a. In Workspace, use File -> Export to excel.

b. In Excel, copy all the “new objects” with same name exist conflict into a new tab. Then use the transpose function to place all objects in a row. Copy this list and paste into MS Word.

c. In Word, use replace function to replace the “space” in between each file name with a semicolon “;”. Now copy and paste this list into the WC search window to execute the search.

i. Note: if it is an extremely long list of files(I’ve had over 1000), then you will need to use the search in the upper right of WC pages. [cid:image003.jpg@01D067A1.72850460]

d. In Windchill search results table, add objects into the workspace. (you can reuse content in the workspace or download over the top of the file in this transaction)