multiple configs, loadpoints, etc...

[rollinsn]

Hello Pro/People

I spent an hour or so poking around PTC.com (Pro/E help was just about
useless) without satisfaction, so I am finally going to seek tips and
advice and knowledge from real humans who can read and process and
understand. A knowledgebase has its place, but not for this, I guess.

I want to have a standardized config.pro that everyone uses, but I don't
want to take away users' freedom to customize their own workflow.

We are 5 users with Pro/E installed locally on each machine. We access
our floating licenses from an off site server. We do not run Ilink or
Windchill...

In the shortcut for Pro/E, the "Start In" field holds the path to a
folder that contains a config.pro. Is this working folder considered
the Loadpoint? Is the "text" folder in the install directory another
location for a different config file?

I think I can copy the install folder structure to a network drive and
everyone can point to that for launching Pro/E. True? Is that a better
way to centralize a config? Is there a performance penalty for that?

I am happy to read an article and learn that way, but I was not able to
find anything that helps. Thanks for your efforts...

-Nate


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[dgschaefer]

Nathan,

There are many ways to do this, the key is understanding how Pro|E finds
the config files. They load in the following order:

<load point=">\text\config.sup
<load point=">\text\config.pro
<user's home=" dir=">\config.pro
<start in=" dir=">\config.pro

Here's what those things mean:

Load point - The directory where Pro|E is installed.
config.up - A 'super' config file. Any options set in this file
cannot be overwritten by later specifications of the same option,
whether later in the config.sup or an a later config.pro file. Must be
in the <load point=">\text folder
Home Directory - Defined by windows environment variable
Start In - Also called the startup dir, this is defined in the
properties dialog for the icon used to launch Pro|E

Some philosophy things to keep in mind:

Keep your config.sup file small, if you choose to use one. Keep options
like mapkey or search_path which can have more than one valid
specification out of there as Pro|E will only accept one of them and
will block all others.

Only set things on a global scale, either in the company config.pro or
the config.sup, that effect the quality of the data (like tolerance
settings) and things that you want everyone to do the same (like start
part locations). Anything that is a matter of preference, leave to the
user. That will make for happier users.

Make sure everyone is mapping the appropriate server drives where config
files are stored to the same drive letter.

Here's what we do here:

All Pro|E installations use the PTC default install folder so that each
<load point="> path is the same.

Company config.sup & config.pro are placed in the <load point=">\text
folder. These are stored on the server and are copied via batch file
when Pro|E is started, so everyone is using the latest file.

The 'start in' is set to a server directory for each user's personal
config files. We name the directory the user's login name so that we
can use %username% in the path to find the directory and not code the
user's name into the path.

Config.win files load the same way, but don't add onto each other
predictably. We have a company and user config.win files, but restrict
changes to the the company file to only change the drop down menus and
prohibit user changes to the drop down menus. That way there should be
no config.win conflicts.

That should give you a good start, shout if you need more info.

Doug Schaefer

[lwh]

As config.pro files (other than config.win) are pure text files, You can use a simple OS script to concatenate multiple files, e.g. one general, then a project-specifc, finally a user file. If the same setting is defined multiple times, the last one wins.

You can even generate additional entries in this script.

If You remove any config.pro files from the standard folders (ProE install, working directory, home directory - wherever this in in Windows), You can place the resulting file in the working directory before ProE is launched there.

Create a new ProE start script, which creates the config.pro and then calls ProE.

We had that working even in a mixed OS environment (Windows and UNIX) using a single Tcl script and a single set of source configs for all.