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Hi
I hope you are doing well.
May someone explain what is the function of a trail file and why it is important to keep them on a location?(is it ?)
Sincerely yours.
Hi,
A few useful links:
Hello @AM_9243347
@VladimirN guidance to PTC DOcuments is very good.
In addition to that, please allow me sharing further views on the function and importance of trail files as a general rule, from a very high perspective. What follows is far from being really exhaustive, but hope this will give you at least a first overview of why we propose access to them for all our customers.
Essentially, trail files register what is done in a given session of Creo Parametric :
Then, in the future, maybe after several weeks of work, you don't need to kep the trails. You may wish to backup them (just to be sure to not lose info which may be needed in the future), or even just delete them (if you never use to check them).
Last information:
Regards,
Serge
An unusual but very useful thing I just did with trail files last week was processing a complete directory of 100s of drawing files to create DXF files. A division of the company wanted to convert Creo drawing files that were recently made to DXF format, so they can easily be communicated to suppliers, etc. Doing one or two files is not that bad, just a lot of menu picks to set all the parameters, like AutoCAD 2000, etc. Doing all that stuff 100s of times is incredibly tedious and I absolutely guarantee that a file will be missed.
So, the trick was to start a fresh session of Creo, open one of the files, make a DXF, then exit Creo. Now I have a trail file that is, in essence, a macro for the processing of a file. It's really obvious in that file where the necessary file names for the input and output files are, and what section of the commands does the processing. So I generate a list of the .drw files in the directory, then edit the trail file to duplicate the processing commands, replacing the file names in each "block" with the ones from my list. I have a powerful editor (Emacs) that makes it easy to use a macro to do a repetitive sequence of edits, so this takes very little time.
Once the trail file is done, I run it in the directory and in minutes I have what would have taken me hours of boredom to do.
Perhaps such usage of trail files is not sanctioned by PTC, but it's a tool I'm going to use whenever such a task comes up in the future.
Hello @KenFarley
Thanks to have shared your experience with trail files. This is a very good example of when it is needed, and how to deal with this.
For the future, let me however share an alternate way for this buisness need, which will be probably easier for you than reworking trail files (which is never easy). Consider maybe usage of Distributed Pro/BATCH (from <Creo Parametric load point>\Parametric\bin\ptcdbatch.bat utlity) where you can access a task named DXF 2D export, dedicated to generate DXF files from multiple drawings in batch (no UI) from a list of existing drawings:
If you're interested in this approach, you'll find further technical details on Distributed Pro/BATCH in Help Center here, or in Central Resource Article 139340 here.
Regards,
Serge
Yes, I knew about the batch utility, but unfortunately don't seem to have it installed. As I understand it, this must be done when installing Creo, as it is not a "default" installation. Since it takes a lot of explaining to our IT folks and waiting a while to get the necessary permissions to do any installations, I went this way.
In other discussions of Pro/BATCH I stumbled upon there were implications that it was a bit unreliable - stopping after processing 10 files, needing to have settings done in a config.pro file, etc. With the trail file technique I can do all the things I want to do to each file, without worrying whether a config parameter can be used to set up an output to meet my needs.