Solved: Does Windchill PDMLink work with Anvil 5000?

dross · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Our company is considering getting Windchill PDMLink to use with our Creo files. We have a lot of legacy Anvil 5000 drawings, can these be imported into the PDM?

TomU · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Wow, I seriously thought we were the only ones with old Anvil data...

Yes, you can import them into Windchill but they will come in as documents (WT Documents), not CAD models (EPM Documents). This works okay since Anvil can't be directly integrated with Windchill anyway. Practically this means that anytime you want to open a Anvil file from Windchill, you simply download it and then open it with Anvil from your downloads folder.

There won't be any automatic publishing in Windchill. There are some options to create your own representations and then upload them manually, but we haven't tackled that yet. We did modify the file types list in Windchill to include the different Anvil file extensions and then show the appropriate icon. Let me know if you need help with this. It's very easy to do.

You may also want to consider creating a sub-type of the WT Document type. This will allow you to create custom attributes specific to your Anvil files.

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TomU · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Wow, I seriously thought we were the only ones with old Anvil data...

Yes, you can import them into Windchill but they will come in as documents (WT Documents), not CAD models (EPM Documents). This works okay since Anvil can't be directly integrated with Windchill anyway. Practically this means that anytime you want to open a Anvil file from Windchill, you simply download it and then open it with Anvil from your downloads folder.

There won't be any automatic publishing in Windchill. There are some options to create your own representations and then upload them manually, but we haven't tackled that yet. We did modify the file types list in Windchill to include the different Anvil file extensions and then show the appropriate icon. Let me know if you need help with this. It's very easy to do.

You may also want to consider creating a sub-type of the WT Document type. This will allow you to create custom attributes specific to your Anvil files.

dross · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Tom, thanks for your quick answer.

I don't know anything about PDM Link and am not even sure that is the correct solution as I see PTC has many types of Windchill / PDM softwares.

Our goal is configuration management, and to output PDFs.

It seems from what you stated above that it does not output PDFs from Anvil, is this correct?

How hard is to import all of our Creo models and drawings? Can this be done in batch form?

Do the original models and drawings then get deleted?

My only experience with this type of software was with True Vault back in 2001.

Thanks again for your help!

TomU · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Windchill will not automatically generate PDFs of the Anvil files. You would need to generate these in advance and then upload them as representations. There are certainly methods to do bulk importing, but I'm not personally familiar with them. There are other people here who are, so you may want to search the community for "bulk loader".

On the Creo side of things, if you only need to load in a single version (the latest) of a bunch of objects, this is very easy to do from a Creo workspace coupled with Windchill. There is an "import to workspace" option that will automatically add the objects to your workspace. From there you just need to check them in. Once you have the data in Windchill, then from that point on you should be working with this data, not something still left on your local hard drive or the network.

It would probably be a really good idea for you to find a PTC rep. and ask for a demo of PDM Essentials and PDM Link.

dross · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Tom,

Regarding the import to workspace, would the files need to be in session in Creo or can they be imported right from PDM link?

It would be a pain to have to open every file in Creo in order to get them into PDM Link.

TomU · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Creo is used to import the files, but the workspace handles the process. You don't actually have to manually open each file one by one. It happens in the background and they never actually appear on the screen. It works quite well.

breed · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Anvil in the title got my attention. We chose not to import Avil files as we converted most of them to AutoCAD files in batch. This also helps because we can use the AutoCAD workgroup manager to access and edit the files.

Are these files review only or do they get updated?

1. Publishing: If you can find a way to create a PDF from an Avil file from the command line then you could create a custom publisher. (We do this for our AutoCAD files) It would be similar to this: CS32402 and https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS40919

2. PTC has a batch import wizard but I have not used it so I can't give you much info there.

TomU · ‎Dec 10, 2015

Anvil does make a batch export tool, ANVIL HPGL, that can convert your existing files to DWG/DXF/PDF/etc. If you export to DWG, you won't even need to publish them since Creo View (free viewer integrated with Windchill) can open them up directly.