Preference to control the 'Create and Auto associate Part' feature

[mmathew]

Without having each users at site to manually select the 'Create and Auto associate Part' option while creating an EPMDocument (MCAD or ECAD) via Windchill workspace UI, it would be nice to have a preference that controls the feature that can be controlled at the site level.

Use case is : User logs into Windchill, navigates to the workspace and creates a new CAD Document using the 'New CAD Document' wizard. There is a check box that says 'Create and Associate Part' in the first step of the wizard.

If the preference is set, the checkbox would be selected by default and then a WTPart automatically gets created when a user creates an EPMDocument.

[DarrenStorey]

There is already a preference which controls if the auto associate check box is checked on check-in. The user however is free to unselect as you are only locking the default condition of the tickbox. In Windchill 10 you can also create a CAD Doc from template along with owner associated part, although depending on your numbering rules you might have limited success with this feature.

Personally I find auto association on check-in to be a bit of a blunt instrument, although you might have a different opinion depending on your working practices.

1. You can only associate to the root type of part (unless you customize)
2. Do you really want a windchill part created "every" time, even for skeletons, topdown sub models and other items which are not in your BOM? This may stop you using CAD centric part structures, when you might otherwise be able to.

Just some food for thought... Darren

[mmathew]

Hi Darren,

Thanks for the comment.

The already existing preference that you are talking about just controls the behavior on checkin. say while checking in a prt from creo. But the preference that I am talking about is to control the check box when user creates a CAD Document in Windchill UI. I should have made that clear in the initial idea post. my mistake and I will update that.

For the problem no #1 that you mentioned, see if this helps.

1. Follow the below document to map the creo component to a soft/sub type of EPMDocument in Windchill. I just tried this and works fine for me..

https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS160454&source=tssearch

2. And to create an associated sub type of WTPart to your Sub  type of EPMDocument, use the 'The Default Type of Part to Create' attribuute on the EPMDocument sub type to specify the internal name of the WTPart sub type you want to be associated.

Both the above worked fine for me.. and I was using Windchill 10.1

[kpritchard]

I like this approach as it allows better leverage of mappings in AutoAssociate.  There is functionality to go at this another way and create a CAD Document via optional checkbox when creating a WTPart.  That functionality leaves a bit to be desired as there does not appear to be the same mapping capability as AutoAssociate so there is a lot of manual entry of redundant data that would be better handled through mappings.

[mmathew]

Agree with you on that Keir.

Another reason why I do not want to use the other way is that there are designers who does not really know/want to deal with WTParts. That becomes too much of an overhead for them.