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How do I create an Item Backed Picklist attribute in Windchill?

doehr
1-Newbie

How do I create an Item Backed Picklist attribute in Windchill?

The title pretty much says it all: how do I create an Item Backed Picklist attribute in PDM-Link?

For those of you who may not have a blinking clue of what I'm talking about, I learned about these during the time our company has been preparing to deploy an Integrity installation on top of our Windchill system for Requirements Management, and a situation has come up where at least one of them could be very, very handy in Windchill. To put it in perspective, you may already know about the selection-list style of Global Attribute that you can already make in PDM-Link in the Type and Attribute Manager, either by radio buttons or drop-down list, and you make the list of options by putting entries in the Legal Value List on the Constraints tab, using | to separate each one. Once you go past maybe 6 entries maintaining one of those sets of values can get a bit messy. And the new need for us that has come up would very likely have to have several hundred options, constantly changing. I think you can see the issue here .

With an Item Backed Picklist attribute, I could link the attribute to a new custom object type that I would create, with very basic lifecycle templates and the like, and then create as many instances of that object that were needed to be the several hundred options, in a Library context that was visible to every user in the system, and then when editing the Part (which is where I want to add the attribute) I could just select from the list of created object instances for the one that matched. Like what happens in the Integrity variant.

I tried experimenting with the Reference attribute type in the Type and Attribute Manager, but it didn't really seem to work and match what I was looking for. Any ideas anyone?

Daryl

1 REPLY 1
RandyJones
19-Tanzanite
(To:doehr)

Daryl Oehr wrote:

The title pretty much says it all: how do I create an Item Backed Picklist attribute in PDM-Link?

For those of you who may not have a blinking clue of what I'm talking about, I learned about these during the time our company has been preparing to deploy an Integrity installation on top of our Windchill system for Requirements Management, and a situation has come up where at least one of them could be very, very handy in Windchill. To put it in perspective, you may already know about the selection-list style of Global Attribute that you can already make in PDM-Link in the Type and Attribute Manager, either by radio buttons or drop-down list, and you make the list of options by putting entries in the Legal Value List on the Constraints tab, using | to separate each one. Once you go past maybe 6 entries maintaining one of those sets of values can get a bit messy. And the new need for us that has come up would very likely have to have several hundred options, constantly changing. I think you can see the issue here .

With an Item Backed Picklist attribute, I could link the attribute to a new custom object type that I would create, with very basic lifecycle templates and the like, and then create as many instances of that object that were needed to be the several hundred options, in a Library context that was visible to every user in the system, and then when editing the Part (which is where I want to add the attribute) I could just select from the list of created object instances for the one that matched. Like what happens in the Integrity variant.

I tried experimenting with the Reference attribute type in the Type and Attribute Manager, but it didn't really seem to work and match what I was looking for. Any ideas anyone?

Daryl

Sounds like an External Enumerated Value List would work:

http://www.ptc.com/cs/help/windchill_hc/wc102_hc/index.jspx?id=WCCG_Serv_EnumeratedTypes_ExtEnumValList&action=show

Basically you create a java class that returns a list of values. In this case the class could query for the instances of your new custom object type.

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