Identification of "Active" Products in PDMLink?

[ScottMorris]

Version: Windchill 12.0

Use Case: Windchill contains many product containers for many programs. Some of them are still Active, but many of them are Inactive and only open for data sharing. How to quickly and easily identify "Active" products in the portfolio?

Description:

What are people using as a best practice to identify Active Products in Windchill vs. Inactive Products in Windchill?

Windchill does not allow out of the box modification of the Products page with table views, so it shows All products all the time based on container team membership. The only work-around is to tag a product as a Favorite ⭐ and show the Favorite column in the table on a user-by-user basis. Another option is to create and maintain a customization for the table.

We have many product containers in Windchill, some for Active programs and many for Inactive programs that remain open for data sharing between products. With the exception of favorites, I am struggling with an effective way to tag, identify and display the "state" of a Product since Windchill Products are not state driven.

We can create attributes for a Product, but I am not aware of a way to expose them in the table view for the Products page, only add them to a layout so they are visible on the Details page which most people never visit.

I am considering a naming convention for the Description field, but I am not a big fan of repurposing a field for multiple uses with a naming convention. Curious what others might be doing?

[BenLoosli]

Rename the product itself to indicate it is an inactive product?

[Hari_Vara]

Hi,

It would have been nice if Product container too has a Lifecycle. I know its difficult to modify the data model architecture of the container at this stage of a matured application like Windchill. But  users will like that function.

Or an easier one is to have a glyph stating an Icon for Active, and other for Inactive. Make it available in the Product page OOTB.

Should I create the idea for this?

Best Regards

Hari

[avillanueva]

I know its possible but I did this so long ago, I forgot how.

PID is an IBA I added to the Product object so this means its possible. I need to do some research but I think it was related to modifying the internal view that gets stored somewhere. 

[avillanueva · Accepted solution]

Well, I must have solved this back in '10. Definition is stored in BLOBS against the TABLEVIEWDESCRIPTOR table. This is why I could not find and custom code or configuration setting.

This seems to be the clue: https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS286188?source=search

There should be a way to export, modify then import the table column definition. It appears to be an XML file.