Families for Parent-Child relations of WTDocuments

[HugoHermans]

Windchill now provides the possibility to create parent-child relations between documents.  This creates (implicitly) families of documents.  It would be very helpfull if there could be a table in the tab 'related objects' from a document, to picture the family members of that document.

The alternative now is that you have a table with the parents, and when you go to a parent, you can have the children of that parent.  But you never can have the children of all the parents of a document in one table.

[DarrenStorey]

Hugo, I'm not clear what this might look like. Are you asking for a 'structure table' and a 'where used table' side by by side. I don't naturally think of structured documents as a family. Don't the same rules apply here as with WTParts and CAD Docs? - Darren

[sm]

Sounds like you are looking for a list of "associated" documents based on the strucutre? So if you have a structure like this...

You would like to see a "Child" Documents table like this?
(this is just a mockup of the folder browser)

[HugoHermans]

Hey Darren,

Indeed, I think about a combination of 'where used one level up' with 'related one level down'.

Suppose my document is member of 3 baselines, I want to see a table with the 3 baselines AND the documents contained in each baseline.

Maybe I should create a fake example to clarify the concept.  OR make a screenshot, because it's a concept a colleague knows in another environment.

[AL_ANDERSON]

You should use the "Structure" tab for finding document structure, and use the "Related Objects" "Where Used" to find where that document is used in the structure of other documents.

As for this:  "But you never can have the children of all the parents of a document in one table," you can simply put all the parent documents into a next higher master document "parent" then expand all the children of all the levels to get what you are looking for.

Al

[HugoHermans]

Hey Al,

It's correct, Document Structures come close.  I'm not so keen using Structures for documents, unless there is an hierarchical nature among the documents, and you have to have edit access to the parent in order to add a child.  Document References align more to what I want to achieve, except for the 'Family Overview'.  Another option could be adding the documents to Managed Collections, but with the same comment.

Hugo.

[AL_ANDERSON]

"unless there is an hierarchical nature among the documents, and you have to have edit access to the parent in order to add a child."

That is exactly what Document Structure does.  Although the names of the links are confusing because they overlap different WTPart link names for different functionality, "Document Reference" for WTDocuments is a WTDocument version to WTDocument version link, while "Uses" (I think it is a WTDocumentStructureHierarchLink under the covers) on the Structure Tab is a WTDocument version to WTDocument master link.  We use this all the time for both single level document structures (i.e. a "Sales Order" document has "Sales Order Drawing" children so the parent points to the latest revision of the childe Sales Order Drawings) and multi level (i.e. a Design Manual that has a "Manual" top level, "Chapter" second levels, and "Section" third levels where each section uses the latest version of WTDocuments in each section).  For "Family Overview" you can go to the top level document and "Expand All" to show the latest version of every document in the multi-level family.  And you can easily edit (or revise and edit, depending on your desire to use revision control over these documents) parent documents to add or remove child objects.  You can also Filter the structure by Latest or Latest Released, or other filters, just like any structure. For "Families" this approach is much better than a simple link from version to master with structure since that would not show multiple levels llike the "Uses" link.  Also, with document structure, you get muli-level "Where Used" for each document.

You should try it.

[HugoHermans]

I will give it a try, and come back to it.  Thanks.