Drawing and document search

[rhart]

I have some legacy/migrated drawings in Windchill but these ‘Drawings’ are actually wt.documents because at migration time we only had the PDF or TIFF files and they’re not linked with the wt.part.

In Thingworx Navigate there’s separate tasks to search for drawings and documents by number or name, are there any suggestions how to help users find the drawings they are looking for, when the drawings are actually documents?

[avillanueva]

We have exactly the same issue. We have a document soft-type that deals with drawings that are not created via some WGM or Creo integration. The navigate apps are hardcoded to a very specific object model that this case does not handle. To the end user, they care not if its a WTDocument or EPMDocument. Other than training the user, there is not much that can be done short of writing your own app. 

[barko · Accepted solution]

Navigate can only display the dataset that Windchill sends back to it. In Windchill, drawings need a link to the wt.part for the drawing to be associated with the part. This is created when the drawing (or part?) is published. Publishing does not occur automatically when an object is saved, so if it was not published when created it needs to be opened in Windchill (or Creo?) and manually published to create the association or link. Then Windchill will include the drawing in the dataset for the part requested through Navigate.

You may need to talk  with a Windchill engineer for more details about how the association or link is established.