Windchill Out of Sync

[rjohnson-4]

A student and I both edited the same part at the same time, with one of us somehow not checking it out first.   So the one version was A.3 and the other was A.4.  The A.3 person (me) needed to upload the rest of assembly and could not.   I just threw away the latest revs and reloaded.   So a couple of questions:

1. How did we get into this situation?   Do I need to lock or checkout a whole assembly to prevent others from using it (rather than just counting on Windchill to do it for me)?
2. Is there a way to roll back Windchil to a previous version?   The changes in A4 were minor compared to A3, so would have preferred to discard A4 instead.

Rande J.

FRC4931

[wgysi]

Rande,

Whenever you open a file from Windchill in Creo and begin modifying it, a dialog box should pop up asking you to make an action.  Typically it was be a drop down list with the options of "Check Out", "Continue", or "Read Only".  If you select "Continue", then you will be allowed to make modifications to the part but without having control of the versioning of the part.  This can be helpful when you just need to mock up an idea but don't necessarily want to save it.

You may also want to make sure that you are always working with an internet connection.

I'm not 100% sure on the previous version roll-back.

[smorris · Accepted solution]

Rande, last year PTC configured Windchill to always show the out-of-date column in the workspace. This is the primary means of knowing whether or not your content files are latest or not. Personally, I train my team to dump their workspace at the end of the day when their work is complete. If they don't, many of the kids keep content in their workspace for the entire build season and never use the Update or Synchronize actions to update the files in their workspace.

Even worse, I have seen many teams attempt to share a workspace with multiple users by all signing in with the same credentials. This is sure-fire path to a corrupt workspace and invalid content. Windchill was never intended to be used by the same person in multiple locations concurrently.

To solve the issues you have, try using the Update action in the workspace or use the RMB menu in model tree to update the model while open in Creo. Getting a proper video on how to deal with out-of-date CAD in the workspace has been on my list for a while now, but always gets put on the back burner while trying to get the team prepped for the build season. I'll get it done eventually.

[rjohnson-4]

We have taken steps to avoid all this: clean out workspaces every day, check out parts when you open them, etc.   But this one got us.

Sub-assemblies on the robot are assigned to various students.   Once a week I load them up, take a look, and tweak anything out of place (often creating new parts rather than using ones already in the database, or using different constraints and references).   Sometimes I send the students a list of things to fix and sometimes I fix them myself, depending on how complex the task is. 

I was doing that this weekend while the student was chatting with me in one of our online tools.   I thought he was just looking at the part, but he actually checked it out instead and modified it.   Most of the assembly I had checked out, but one or two pieces in the assembly were not.   I don't believe I made any changes to them, so it's entirely possible I might have selected Continue for them.   I'll watch that for next time.

Windchill certainly has it's quirks, but it's been a great tool for our team.   Multiple people can work on different pieces of the robot at the same time and then we can put them together at meetings for design discussions.   I can also look at the student's work from my machine at any time and comment.   So our CAD team starts working like the programmers!  As a matter of fact, a few of the programmers help us with CAD while they wait for code to write.