Windchill customers use more and more an advanced publication technique for their CAD assemblies, especially when the assemblies become large. It’s positioning assemblies. Basically, the worker opens an empty representation of the assembly, list the first level objects, get their position and stores them – it’s super fast.
But this mode has some limitations : https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS130991?&language=en&posno=1&q=positioning%20assemblies%20as...
• Process Steps
• Flexible Components
• Harness Features (identified using the out-of-the-box recipe setting adapter/harnessFeatList= , i.e. empty)
• Other Assembly Level Features (identified by using the out-of-the-box recipe setting adapter/assyFeatList=911 915 916, i.e. Hole, Slot and Cut, respectively).
Until the latest releases of the publishing adapters, having a mix of Creo Parametric and any 3rd party cad model (using Unite) was also not supported.
To keep a good performance, there’s an extended positioning assemblies method that can help. This one let the worker opens the assembly in a predefined rep and it uses the positioning assemblies workflow for everything it can, and creates dedicated portions of the viewables for the remaining objects (such as 3 components that are cut by an assembly level cut).
OOTB, the users have to set attributes on the CAD assembly to chose what type of publication will be used.
That’s where modelcheck can play a good role. For instance, there’s a OOTB modelcheck control that can detect and count the number of flexible components in an assembly. Unfortunately, there’s no such controls for the other types of limitations (the assembly level features control that exist now can’t be used as way too many objects are detected as assembly level features (spools, annotations, …). Same for the process steps or the harnesses.
The idea is that modelcheck detects all those cases, creates some attributes based on the checks and then we can automatically switch the publication mode based on simple relations or logic.
