The ‘Did You Know?’ series focuses on providing PTC Windchill users with informative, “how-to” tips to help them get the most out of their software. Today PTC’s William Gruss shows us how to check-out and modify PTC Creo Parametric CAD documents using PTC Windchill Project Link 10.1.
Let’s say we wanted to increase the pitch of the angled surface on the tip of a part. To do this, the related CAD document needs to be checked-out and the geometry needs to be altered. First, let’s locate the ‘parent assembly’ and ‘dependents’ and check-out the CAD document in one, single operation.
Check-out the Document
To locate the CAD documents, use the “Search” function. Download the assembly and the dependents to the workspace by selecting “Add to Workspace” in the dropdown menu. The “Advanced” tab enables you to visualize the CAD documents marked for download within the workspace as well as enables you to simultaneously accomplish other tasks. Select “Okay” to complete this operation. It should also be noted that you can just as easily use the PTC Windchill "Search" function to achieve this same outcome.
Modify the Document
You can display the workspace contents by selecting the “Common Folders” menu, then “Workspace”. From here, it’s possible to open the model in PTC Creo Parametric and make the necessary change. In this example, to increase the pitch of the angled surface at the tip of the “Chuck”, you need to modify the D5 dimension that defines the tip geometry. It may be easier to identify this dimension if you switch the display to their symbols by selecting “Model Intent” in the menu and then switch symbols. Save the model to the active workspace then close the model window.
Review and Share
To review these changes within the Workspace contents, refresh the page. You will notice that the iteration for the CAD document has been incremented.
Let’s verify that the associated WT part has iterated, as well. Use the “Add Objects to Workspace” functionality to locate and display the version of the associated WT part to the latest version of the document. The “Advanced” tab will enable you to display the information about each. Within the “Advanced” menu, select the “Collect the Related Parts” functionality to locate the associated WT part. You will now see that the version of the “Chuck_5-10” WT part matches the version of the “Chuck_5-10 CAD” document. Aternately, you could simply navigate to the WTParts information page to confirm that the it has iterated and is described by the newly checked-in CAD document version. To share these changes with other users, check-in the CAD document again.
To walk through these steps following the PTC University video tutorial in action, sign-in or create an account on the PTC University Learning Exchange.
