How to capture the "Approver name" from the promotion request into the drawing title block?

[rr-2]

Hi

An user has checked in some prt files and drawings into Windchill. He has created the Promotion request as well and it got approved.

How to show the "approver name" into the drawing title block?

Please share your thoughts.

regards

Radhakrishnan

[BineshKumar1]

I think the best option available now is Drawing approver name from Windchill into the proe drawing

as there are no PTC_WM parameter which can get the promotion process details.

For most of the implementations, this is not a valid use case because generally the manufacturing isn't concerned about who approved the design. for them, the release state matters more and the system maintains the complete audit trail

Thank you

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller

[rr-2]

Hi Binesh

Thanks.

I had earlier used Persistent class helper to achieve this in the workflow. The only drawback i found is the version will get iterated. (e.g from A.1 to A.2) during this process.

Because of the reason, we are checking out and checking in through the code.

Please clarify whether the link specified will iterate the object from (A.1 to A.2) similar to Persistent helper class.

Thanks.

regards

Radhakrishnan

[BineshKumar1]

Hello Radhakrishnan,

I don't think there is a way to update the attributes of an object without itertating irrespective of whether you are using API or a webject. The only possible way I could think of is by firing a db query directly to perform an update on database which is not a best practice

Thanks

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller

[LewisLawrence]

We tried (quite a bit of effort was spent) to get workflow information into the drawing border when we first started looking at CAD integration before eventually giving up on the idea and going with another approach.

For us the main problem we could not overcome was that to get the Approver/Checker/Whatever information to show on the face of the print (and into the representation) you have to iterate and regenerate the CAD drawing. Doing this server side with no human involvement, particularly for assembly drawings was going to introduce issues for us. Imagine the use case where someone approved an assembly drawing which looked good to them, but in the meantime a component had changed. This could mean that the assembly drawing would update during the server side "approval stamping" without anyone being involved in the modification. Unless you have your change process tied down to the point where the above scenario is not going to happen then I recommend you try a different solution.

The other approach we went with was obvious when we took a fresh look at things, the reason you historically have the Approver/Checker/Whatever information on a drawing is because "back in the day" when using actual paper drawings, it was the only way to provide an audit trail and find out who was accountable for something. Although this is not really required any more it is "the way we do things here" and still often required for some Luddite QA process, so is "required" (this kind of nonsense frustrates me, as the actual signature/attribute data tends only to be someone's initials and given that we manufacture globally with a deal of outsourcing the information is really useless to most people viewing the print, sorry for the rant). We went with server side watermarking of the representation and put the workflow participant information along the bottom of the PDF representation, we have a listener that catches state change events and removes any existing representation and triggers a new publish job as required. We also watermark on the EPMDocument number, version and iteration, as we have weird and wonderful legacy data in the system where the face of the print could be showing just about anything.

The CAD Worker is configured to create the representation without regenerating the drawing so there is no risk of the drawing content changing and there is no additional iteration. Additionally if the Document changes state for whatever reason we automatically update the Watermark based on the most recent Change process, so this is more accurate. Our drawing border/format no longer has the "traditional" (kinder word than Luddite) Approver/Checker/Whatever info, we also moved to a single 60 character description which is the CAD Document name. We have actually taken this a stage further and removed the material/coating etc information from the print also, it has been moved to the WTPart. But that is off topic for this discussion.

Hope that was useful,

[rr-2]

Hi Lewis Lawrence

Thanks for taking effort in understanding the issue and for the explanation you tried to share.

I did give a try in working out the watermark. The Publishing on the creo view was bad, as the customer is selecting various paper formats like a0, a1, a2, a3 for different drawings.

I have few queries. Please share your inputs.

* Do you mean to say that the title block is ignored for the approval information and the watermark on a different location (bottom of the page)  is presented in the pdf?

* If we publish it in the pdf, will it work according to the size of the drawing format along with the watermark? 

* Can you please point out the brief steps in the watermarking and publishing you have carried out?

regards

Radhakrishnan

[LewisLawrence]

In response to your questions:

* Do you mean to say that the title block is ignored for the approval information and the watermark on a different location (bottom of the page)  is presented in the pdf?

Yes, there is no "approved by, checked by" or similar in the drawing border. That information is watermarked along the bottom of the page outside the border.

* If we publish it in the pdf, will it work according to the size of the drawing format along with the watermark? 

Yes, we have a very evolved watermarking process that looks at the size of the page and acts accordingly with positioning and font scaling of the watermark.

* Can you please point out the brief steps in the watermarking and publishing you have carried out?

We intercept the standard representation process and modify the file before it is picked up by Windchill.

To explain simply, whenever a representation is created a file is downloaded from Windchill, dropped into a temporary folder and a process called to create a representation of that for upload back to Windchill, this is uploaded and the temporary files/folder are removed. We intercept that process and modify the PDF file before it is uploaded to Windchill, adding the watermark to it.

Hopefully the attached examples makes more sense, note that the drawing contains no Material Information either, you have to go to the WTPart for that.

[jhall2]

Lewis,

This is very interesting. I have a question, though.  Where it says PTCLOAD, is there a way of finding the human who checked or approved it?  I'm missing that component.

James

[LewisLawrence]

The user "PTCLOAD" is a system Windchill account we use at Weatherford for system activity and testing, our workflow processes prevent the same user from submitting and promoting. So we use this account to allow one person to complete testing, I also choose this data to avoid naming any actual users in a public forum. In day to day use the watermarked information is the display name of the user, so it would "Lawrence, Lewis" if I had completed the task. I hope that is clear.

[jhall2]

Perfectly, and exactly what I thought it might be!  Thanks!

James

[icelynnin]

This means you have a pretty strong customisation doing the actual watermarking of change attributes- and not OOTB server-side watermarks.
How exactly do you 'intercept' the process here, I suppose simply adding in some lines to the publish script on the publish server that performs these actions (or triggers the program, routine etc. that does this, presumably interrogating Windchill objects via REST/OData for the ECN information to be 'stamped')?

[cbrosig]

Hi all,

as far as I understand the issue there are no parameters which are available in Creo regarding promotion (approver, requester, date a.s.o.)

All available Creo parametric parameters will be derived from pdmlink in PTC_WM_xx parameters.

Nothing new so far. INNEO solutions developed a PDMLink customizing which will meet your request pretty much.

The tool Release Information Delegate Service will drive promotion parameters from PDMLink to creo parametric.

As you see there are enough people concerned about this issue that there is already an affordable customization.

keep up,

regards