Windchill should prevent circular references in BOMs

[OliverDroop]

Jeffrey Zemsky‌

OOTB Windchill gives a warning ONLY while expanding the structure if circular references exists.

This is not sufficient since this can cause several issues in WT and downstream systems.

Therefore it should be prevented at all cost like on the CAD side.

Desired would be to prevent this on insert or checkin of a BOM.

If this is not possible with reasonable performance this should be checked during release by a business rule.

[OliverDroop]

Based on article Document - CS62339 there is no plan to fix

[JeffZemsky]

Oliver Droop‌ - your assumption is correct in that performance is a very large challenge here.  Your thought of a business rule to check for this is an interesting idea.

[GregoryPERASSO]

Hi

we've got a TS case and a fix about this topic, cause BOM explosion in PSB correctly stop the recursive loop, but not the BOM explosion in ESI publishing.

The actual warning is basic,   It check only the diplayed parent nodes, so easy to workaround in Windchill,except for a direct loop on itself 

I'm quite agree to prevent for design BOM,but not for manufacturing and/or Service BOM where in some cases of unmount or retrofit , we need this circular reference...

ERP systems like SAP handle this case,notably by explicitly select an attribute on the BOM link to authorize the loop.

regards

[OliverDroop]

Actually we were able to implement this in a performant way at this timeframe. We implemented a Oracle procedure which was called during bom check in. The query used some clever algorithm to avoid looping through the structure which would be too time consuming.