Windchill Ideas

mschulze · ‎Aug 12, 2022

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders. Implementation of Visualization Solutions at different Customers. 2. What version of Windchill are you currently running? 12.0.2.0 3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. see also CS44087. Currently there is no support for different Publisher Queue Sets for different CAD Authoring Applications, Therefore different CAD Workers cannot run in parallel which increases the the time to convert data. Long conversion times reduce the acceptance by the customer, who wants to see the result as quick as possible. Since there may be following applications that will use these data. e.g. SAP will use drawings. 4. What is the use case for your organization? More and more customers do not only use Windchill PDMLink to manage there creo parametric data, but also use it as a multi cad data management tool, as to what it is designed. Therefore the multi cad visualization must be enhanced. Additionally more and more consumers migrate there 3'rd party cad data to windchill and want to publish there legacy data after a migration in an acceptable time frame. But if they have multi cad data in there environment it is not possible to publish the data of different cad systems in parallel. 5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? The intention is reduce the implementation effort to the customers and to reduce Windchill complexity. Also increase the throughput of cad conversions to reduce the time until the visualization is available. 6. Suggested solution Implement different OOTB Queuesets for different CAD Applications. Additionally it would be helpful to not only define the Queueset bay Type but also by Subtypes or even. additional criteria's like drawing, assembly, parts (not WTPart). It would also be grate if one could send large (e.g. Assemblies/Drawings with may dependencies) jobs (long conversion time) to separate workers so they do not thwart small jobs.

NM_9143163 · ‎Dec 08, 2020

At this moment only 1 active version of Windchill Workgroup Manager (WGM) is possible at the same time, which limits users to work with just one Windchill version at the time. This approach generates problems, e.g. during updates of Windchill or migration of data. Allowing 2 or more installations to coexist, mostly through grater encapsulation of installation (including Windchill File System, WFS, as component of WGM installation and separation of registry keys based on the WGM version) would resolve those issues and allow to work with WGM on the similar basis as Creo - Windchill Interaction.

JD_8854304 · ‎Jun 28, 2021

We would like to see an optional tag/mode added to Windchill Shell and Windchill Solution Installer that allows the process to retry and resume after a fault (without aborting). This could be helpful in the situation when temporarily disabled security policies automatically re-enable themselves, or when virus scan just happens to be scanning a file the installer or shell is trying to access resulting in a data collision.

gleonard3 · ‎Apr 13, 2021

We have an F5 load-balancing-router with a common base URL (https://some.site.com for example) servicing two separate Windchill clusters (https://some.site.com/WindchillA and https://some.site.com/WindchillB for example). When registering with WindchillA, Creo will create a cache directory called some.site.com443. If a user also registers with WindchillB, Creo will use that same cache location that it created when it registered with WindchillA, causing cache corruption. If the cache directory naming included the Windchill webapp name (a.k.a., the Windchill context; i.e., some.site.com443-WindchillA or some.site.com443-WindchillB), then the cache directories would be unique, thus avoiding cache corruption.

awijkmark · ‎Oct 04, 2022

Windchill preference values on user & container level are not always showing the correct value that confuse Windchill behavior - see article CS351826 1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? Automotive What is your role in your organization? Business Analyst Describe your stakeholders. Product Owners = what we produce on the shop floor Manufacturing Owners = responsible for our production and how we produce on the shop floor 2. What version of Windchill are you currently running? 12.1.1.0 3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. Please see article https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS351826 that state Windchill preference values shown in GUI could not always be trusted and this will never be fixed. This idea is to always show correct preference value that Windchill will act on for each user in each Product/Library/Organization. As-Is situation If a preference today is set on site level and delete child instances isused the site value is shown on all sub-levels. If now you change preference value on Product/Library level Windchill will act on that preference value but on user level it still shows another value. This problem occurs in many different combinations for Site / Org / Product/Library / User levels when preference value is set different over time. At the end you cannot trust preference values but you need to test to see how Windchill act and with that point you are in a mess. Idea If a preference value is not set on a sub-level, add information from what higher level the preference value is inherited from. Example: A preference is set on site level and delete child instance is used, value shown: Site => value Org => value ( inherited from site ) Product/Library => value ( inherited from site ) User => value ( inherited from site ) The preference get a new value on one ( 1 ) Product/Library "A" value shown: Site value Org => value ( inherited from site ) Product/Library "A" => new value Product/Library "all others" => value ( inherited from site ) User => value ( inherited from site ) or new value ( inherited from "A" Product/Library ) The preference get a new value by one ( 1 ) User "B" value shown: Site value Org => value ( inherited from site ) Product/Library "A" => new value Product/Library "all others" => value ( inherited from site ) User "B" => new user value User "all others" => value ( inherited from site ) or new value ( inherited from "A" Product/Library ) Now we can always trust and understand preference settings and predict Windchill behavior. 4. What is the use case for your organization? To be able to use Windchill as a PLM-solution, today we doing the work in Excel and legacy solutions because of this GAP in Windchill. It is always a quality risk when the PLM-solution is showing wrong data for users. 5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? Remove local isolated Excel files and legacy solution and move into a modern PLM-solution that will help us to shorten project lead time, secure quality in product design and manufacturing preparation. If not Windchill will solve this we need to select another PLM-solution.

jcarpenter · ‎Oct 19, 2020

Support Windchill on Oracle Linux.

DP_5333499 · ‎Apr 21, 2022

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders. Comercial vehicles. IT consulting. 2. What version of Windchill are you currently running? We are using WGM 11.2.1.5 3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. Due to security issues, we want to upgrade the WGM plattform services. Since a WGM upgrade leads to efforts in our company we only want to upgrade the platform services. 4. What is the use case for your organization? Security issues 5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? The business value is to have always a secure WGM version.

mschulze · ‎Apr 13, 2017

In the WVS Job Monitor (#Site #Utilities #Business Administration) the "Job Summery for Site" gives the admin the information, if a job is failed or not. But the "Job Summery for Site" does not contain the information, why the job failed. For the information why the job has failed, the admin has to select a single failed row and has to try to identify the error in the "Job Detail". This may be possible if a single job fails, if you have a large installation where over 100 jobs fail per day, this is not acceptable anymore. There may be several reasons why the jobs fail. e.g. the easiest may be that the file cannot be retrieved or the worker could not be started .... In this case it would be very helpful if you could filter the listed objects for the failure reason for better error analysis. Note: The "Job Detail" should of course not be removed by that! The current functionality looks like that:

SvenR · ‎Jul 07, 2021

When using WinDU for example we get folders like this with the dates as names: But this is not really helpful. It seems to be some foreign format including month first and omitting the year. Why did someone throw a dice like that? There are some other examples throughout Windchill where this or other kind of date formats are used. Please settle on using ONLY ONE date format on all things Windchill. Please refer to ISO 8601 for this. This would make it really more easy to read and prevent mistakes in understanding. Please post other examples of different timestamp below 👍👍🚀

afiderer · ‎Nov 07, 2020

For maintenance reasons sometimes WVS scheduled jobs have to be deactivated. Pause-function would be great.

djmertz1 · ‎Oct 29, 2020

The software download page needs to provide a page that allows more simplified download of required software. At the least, I should be able to check a box for any of the software I need to download, not open and close a tree of software to grab each. Next Step should be to combine whats needed on the download. In other words, for new install, check PDMlink and all other Required disks checkmarked also. However, the most important capability is that I should be able to wget the files to better automate or quickly download the files. Especially if I have a headless Linux I'm installing on.

mschulze · ‎Nov 02, 2018

CreoView uses the server_prevs.xml to preset CreoView Client settings. Since some CreoView Versions the client can make use of a local cache, to reduces the number of downloads and icrease the client performance. Per default the client cache is located in %userprofile%\AppData\Local\ptc\CreoView Currently (CreoView 5.0) it is not possible/supported to preset the cache_location in the server_prefs.xml e.g. by setting: cache_location=%userprofile%\AppData\Local\ptc\CreoView in the server_prefs.xml Enabing the cache without setting the cache_location leads to an extra question to the user, when entering the preverence setting on the client GUI. Setting the cache_location to a common not existing directory, is insecure (all users on the PC may access this directory) and not possible if the directory does not exist. Note: the base cache_location directory is not created by the client if it does not exist! Please support the usage of environment variables in the server_prevs.xml of CreoView so that cache_location's like "%userprofile%\AppData\Local" can be used in the server_prefs.xml.

MikeMarcoux · ‎Oct 18, 2018

Only one version of Solidworks can be registered to the WGM at a time. As a consulting firm, we run 3-4 different versions of each CAD package (customer specific). Switching applications, when done incorrectly, can cause all sorts of cache issues. Allowing multiple versions of any 3rd part software to remain registered to the WGM would help our switching efficient greatly.

mwaite · ‎Feb 05, 2019

PTC says that manual rehosting is no longer supported as of Windchill 10.2. Customers must use the rehost utility. The rehost utility needs to support more use cases. For example: Customers running Windchill in SSL with self signed certificates where the certificates are not generated by the Windchill Apache server. Currently the customer must customize the rehost utility to prevent Apache self signed certificates from overwriting the customers self signed certificates. The rehost utility does not support additional JNDI adapters. It says it does, but it doesn't. The work around is similar to manual rehosting. The Vault module updates mounts points and copies the vault content from stage to clone. All or nothing. We should be able to update the mount points without coping the content files. Our vaults are on a network share. If the clone starts up and connects to production vaults, we risk the scheduled maintenance ( revaulting, delete unrefferenced files ) corrupting the production vaults. We copy the content to the target mount points when we export the database. We don't want a 10TB stage location for content just so rehost will update the mount points in the database. The rehost utility should support master vaults on remote file servers. I was told by a TS engineer that PTC only tests the rehost utility with a very basic Windchill installation. SSL and remote file servers, network file vaults are all out of scope. If the rehost utility is the only supported method, then it needs to support more use cases.

ThomasArndorfer · ‎Feb 25, 2021

Currently in Windchill 11.2 (and 12 I assume), the text users input into HTMLText fields is not searchable. So that means that the Description field for Change Notice, Change Request, etc, is not searchable. The old string Description value was searchable. In fact, if you select Description via the Advanced Search, it will actually search the legacy string Description value - not the new HTMLText Description. And for some reason when the HTMLText value is written to the database it is encrypted or otherwise obfuscated so that it cannot be searched. My "idea" is that PTC should provide - at a minimum - the equivalent functionality to the field they are replacing and support searching by HTMLText fields.

bcedar · ‎Nov 30, 2020

I find myself needing to know a lot of things specific to Windchill in order to manage and support Windchill. This makes sense, but some of the things don't. Modern applications don't use xml files for import/export, they use json if it's machine driven and yml if it's administrator driven. I find myself often wrapping some management functions in scripts that we design in-house and take yaml files as input. Many companies are moving toward an Infrastructure-as-code methodology, or at least a devops centered practice in their system administration. A very accessible engine that helps with this is Ansible. It would be nice if PTC were to provide Ansible Role(s) to help us maintain our Windchill installations. I would expect it to maintain the following aspects: * Installation * Upgrades * wtSafeArea managed Customizations * wt.load.LoadFromFile functions (export and import) * general system interactions (start, stop, restart method servers, other useful mbean functions) This would be a little difficult to get started, but once started you could release it onto github and ansible galaxy, allowing for open development of the role.

LewisLawrence · ‎Apr 22, 2016

Hopefully this idea is pretty self explanatory, on a WTPart there is a history tab, there is a table for Maturity and Version history. There is really a lot of overlapping information here, and many end users are confused by the need for both. I think one table with some appropriate filtering options would make this much nicer to use. The attached image should save you having to look them both up in your installation.

ttempel · ‎Sep 06, 2018

Add update function of TableViews (TableViewDescriptor) for the LoadFromFile (Import/Export) utility. https://www.ptc.com/it/support/article?n=CS174468

ameyer · ‎Mar 18, 2019

Not all Caches, listed in article CS277427, are listed via Windchill / Site / Utilities / Server Status / Monitoring Tools / Windchill Cache Statistics. These are missing: com.ptc.core.lwc.server.cache.IBADefViewManager$IBADefViewCache wt.cache.size.IBADefViewManager$IBADefViewCache com.ptc.core.lwc.server.cache.AdminTypeDefinitionCacheManager wt.cache.size.AdminTypeDefinitionCacheManager com.ptc.core.lwc.server.cache.StandardTypeDefinitionCacheManager wt.cache.size.StandardTypeDefinitionCacheManager wt.folder.DefaultFolderCache.maxFindSubFolders wt.folder.cache.maxFindSubFolders wt.inf.team.RecomputeQueueCache wt.cache.size.RecomputeQueueCache wt.org.WTRolePrincipalCache wt.cache.size.WTRolePrincipalCache All Cashes should be available via Windchill Cache Statistics

Invisigoth · ‎Mar 08, 2019

The need to seek out and download each and every CD for Windchill is time consuming, hard to re-use, and prone to error. Wouldn't it be nice to just be able to download a package of core CDs for Windchill, and then add on whatever else is needed?

Windchill Ideas

Add Support for dedicated Publisher Queue Sets for different CAD Authoring Applications

Support parallel installation of 2 different Windchill Workgroup Manager (WGM) versions

Add "retry mode" to Solution Installer and Windchill Shell for handling faults with execution

Allow Cache to Support Multiple Windchill Clusters on a Load Balancing Router with Common Base URL

Windchill preference values on user & container level are not always showing the correct value

Support Windchill on Oracle Linux.

Upgrade WGM platform services without update the complete WGM

Extend the WVS Job Summary with the information why a JOB FAILED

Format all Dates / Timestamps etc according to ISO, use only one date format

Pause Jobs on WVS Scheduler Administration

Software Download Simplification

Support environment variables in the server_prefs.xml of CreoView. E.g. to set the cache_location

Allow multiple versions of Solidworks to be registered to WGM simultaneously

The rehost utility needs to support more use cases

Searching by text in HTMLText fields

Publish an Ansible Role or a family of Ansible Roles for all things Windchill

Combine Version History and Maturity History into one frame with filters

LoadFromFile: Enable update function for TableViews (TableViewDescriptor)

Caches missing in Windchill Cache Statistics

Windchill download page should provide a core installation package of CDs for Windchill