If the CAD worker is configured to generate thumbnails during publishing, it should be capable of generating this image while the assembly is loaded into session, especially in the case of extended positioning assemblies. I know for a fact that all models are being loaded into session during extended positioning assembly publishing because I'm generating STEP files as an additional file during their publishing, and the STEP file would be empty if everything wasn't in session during it's creation.
Yes, like the article says, generating a thumbnail after the representation is already created isn't going to work, but it should be possible during representation creation.
The reason that it doesn't generate a thumbnail is for two reasons:
Standard positioning assemblies ONLY download the assemblies during time of conversion. Therefore it cannot generate a thumbnail without all of the content present
Positioning Assemblies (including extended positioning assemblies) don't go out of date the same way that standard representations do, as a result they frequently are NOT republished (because they simply load the geometry of their children). This would result in frequently inaccurate thumbnails because you would not bother with republishing these.
We are looking into the feasibility of updating the thumbnail worker to process positioning assemblies and retrieve the branch links prior to generating the thumbnail. We are also looking at a different mechanism for scheduling the regeneration of thumbnails only on a lower priority so that it would address the issue of them going out of date.
This is something that is in the backlog but we do not have a release confirmed for this yet.
I fully understand why a thumbnail is not generated during publishing of a position assembly, since the entire assembly does not appear to be actually opened fully during the processing by the CAD worker.
For us, what would truly help would be a standard GIF or image file (different from the others) that would give the users of Thingworx tools and viewers of the Details tab in the Information page, an understanding that it is not missing, but simply does not apply.
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