Custom role and lifecycle state creation

[ptc-4050265]

Summary

Easier way to create custom roles/states, etc

It is known that today, we have to manually create the custom roles and states using the Enumcustomize tool, propagating the changes, restarting the environment, and then further configure these objects within the Windchill user interface. 

Business impact

Why must we go through all that effort to create them in RBinfo instead of the nice UI that almost works?
I know you know the process, but to make my point we have to do these steps that require a ant recompile and a stop and start of WC. versus the simple step of giving the object a name in the UI. 

Proposed solution

With such an unfriendly procedure, there should be an easier way of doing all of this within the Windchill user interface without the interference of running Enumcustomize tool and restarting Windchill. 

[rkayasth]

Hello Pavel,

The restart is necessitated by the fact that when the MS starts, it loads all the basic foundation classes from jars (read rbinfo also) into its memory heap, so as to help faster access during the normal execution.

So inorder to incorporate your idea of providing the state and role addition into the Windchill GUI, and thereby prevent the MS restart, is a difficult, since PTC would need to incorporate the logic of on-the-fly compilation and creation and replacement of relevant jars.

[Invisigoth]

I'm here because of https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article?n=CS171244

I'd love to see a way to export this stuff when doing upgrades.

[BjoernRueegg]

 @rkayasth I'm pretty sure they will find another solution to load the roles into memory. With the global enumeration they found also a way. So I guess this is not the problem rather the old java applet architecture. The applets containing all the roles in their jar so that's why you need to re-make all the jar after adding a new role to the rbinfo file.