Checked In CAD Part Icon in 10.x WGM tabel does not changed to Assembly icon if user update the CAD Model to CAD Assembly.

[RahulHRaut]

Document Category is Not Updating if the NX CAD Model turns into an CAD Assembly.

1. Create a NX CAD Assembly from Work group Manager with one component.

2. Check in the CAD Assembly to Windchill.

3. Verify the Category of the CAD Assembly checked in above. It should reflect CAD Assembly. Verify the icon in Workspace as well as in common space. It should reflect CAD Part.

4. Check out the NX CAD Assembly from from the work group manager. Open it in NX. Modify the Assembly by removing existing component.

5. Check in the above modified CAD Assembly to Windchill.

6. Verify the Document category. It should reflect CAD Component as the the CAD document is no more a assembly..

7. Verify the Icon for the modified CAD Assembly (Now Component). It should reflect the CAD Component.

Actual Result: CAD document category remain unchanged even if the Assembly turns into an Component.

Interaction with PTC: Note that all the below options are analysed and seems to be there is no solution available as of now, unless PTC change the core Data model in maintaing the master attribute associated with the Category of the NX CAD document.

Option 1: change the EPMDocumentMaster Document Category

Approach:

            Changing the EPMDocument Master attribute associated with document category on upload.

Limitations:

o   PTC has determined upon further review that they cannot recommend this approach

o   It is unknown what ramifications changing this value will have in the system or with the future WGM improvements

o   PTC recommends not even attempting this to experiment

o   The Document Category attribute is on the EPMDocument Master so any changes to this attribute will reflect on all previous iterations/versions of the NX CAD Documents, including previously Released CAD Documents that the user checking in the latest NX CAD Document may not have access control to “Modify”.

o   Changing this Document Category will NOT change the Document Soft Type, especially if specific Document Soft Types are to be used for Components v/s Assemblies.

o   Since the Document Category is changed on Upload and not on checkin, the Document Category is changed immediately on the Master for all iterations/version including the checked out iteration. If the user does NOT complete the checkin and performs an Undo-Checkout instead of the Checkin, the system will NOT revert the Document Category to the previous value (last checked in iteration). Furthermore, with the universal upload project in X-24/10.2, the changes in the Document Category will be reflected on the uploaded data as part of the private checkout.

Option 2: Creating a custom Icon Delegate

Approach:

o   Windchill Help documentation suggests Icon Delegate and Naming Delegate are still supported customizations.

o   Bose would need to extend the Icon and Naming delegate to detect our condition.

o   We would need to detect a NX EPMDocument that is flagged as CAD Part or CAD Assembly and check its member links to determine if it is actually one or the other.

o   All other documents or types would default to OOTB behavior

o   The check would be done by a high performing SQL query to check for EPMMemberLinks related to that document.

o   A tunable Cache can be put in place to avoid excessive rechecking of this query. 

o   The Icon Delegate and Naming delegate would then display the correct icon or name for the object, ignoring the EPMDocumentMaster attribute.

Limitations:

o   EPMDocumentMaster would not ever be accurate, making the advanced search or reporting capabilities more challenging to manage.

o   Windchill and the Workgroup Manager do not consistently use this icon delegate

o   Overriding the icon delegate specifically for EPMDocuments is not supported, creating new delegates for other classes is.

o   Different pieces of Windchill or WGM potentially 3 or 4 different ways to determine what icon to display

o   Even if this was customized PTC has concerns over performance due to the one-at-a-time query nature of this tool.

o   EPMDocumentIconDelegate is not supported. The one that is supported is lower level delegate which does not have any EPMDocument specific logic. As such, when your customizations override the default delegate, you would need to implement support for all your EPM Documents, not just related to NX.

o   Performance might still be an issue (even with implementing the cache mechanism) because query will be run for one object at a time.

o   PTC thinks (but not sure) the CAD Document Structure component will not call Bose custom delegate.

o   Embedded browser (in the WWGM client) also does not use Windchill Icon Delegate and has its own logic.

o   It looks like Windchill Icon Delegate does not use EPMDocument object, only limited set of information is passed to this delegate. R&D did not have time to investigate if it’s possible to get the object (EPMDocument) from this data. If it is possible, it’s also a performance hit as user would need to query for the object.

Option 3: Naming Delegate

Limitations:

o   his delegate is used for upload to generate name and number, not for display purposes.

o   Some UI pages might need customization if there is no mechanism exists to override the doc type.

Error messages that contain doc type won’t be correct