Linking to Annotation sets, thumbnails and viewing in browser (webgl)

[avillanueva]

I have an external MES tool. Aside from static images, I would like to leverage Creo View annotations (including animations) to show step by step procedures. I know I could take the thumbnail annotation images and make it a URL back to Windchill. I can see exporting and importing a PVZ file into the MES tool as an attachment. 

What would be really neat would be to have Creo View display in the browser like the Structure visualization tab. This way, the user can remain in the MES page for their operations but have a large graphics windows rendering the annotation set via Creo View webgl. Has anyone done some or all of this?

[jbailey]

I have played around with this to show Thingworx dashboards in Windchill. One of the problems you will run into is browser /website security and cross domain scripting problems. Generally, web browsers and web servers don't like embedded windows that come from different domains.  One of the ways I was looking to mitigate that was to put all of our "shared" PTC tools behind the same reverse proxy.

https://<myproxy>/Windchill

https://<myproxy>/Thingworx

In general though, I do like the idea. Kind of ties to a suggestion I made to the creo view folks that they need a web-only creo view viewer that is packagable/can be deployed with a set of viewables. Most downstream users don't need the Client creo view.  They need to be able to view and maybe do simple markups.

Some of the html5 based MBD solutions might be able to be leveraged as well... but yet another tool...

[GregoryPERASSO]

Hello,

We have done a custom Thingworx App,   kind of Navigate App for ERP/MES Production Orders :

As we create our processplans in MPMLink with associated Documentation and leverage CreoIllustrate for 2D Illustrations or Animations and publish these processplans in ERP/MES

Our App display the ERP/MES production order Operations structure (fetch by REST APIs from ERP/MES) and display Windchill Documentation per Operation  (PDF , Creo Drawings, 3D models MBD or Illustrate Animations)

The ThingView widget in thingworx (aka the same CreoView WebGL viewer as in Windchill, simplified to be usable on tablet devices ) allow MBD 3D visualization and Animations with a nice play/pause/slider 

Another solution for some of our sites that do not use Thingworx ,  but have local Web MES is to leverage CreoView WEBGL Toolkit (which is formally the same CreoView library as for Windchill and Thingworx),  but the development effort is a bit higher .... (Expose Windchill APIs, + Build a CreoWebGL toolkit UI )

PTC is working on a Full Web version of the CreoView MCAD client ,  but the release date is not yet confirmed .

regards

Gregory

[jbailey]

I LOVE that they are finally moving on a full web viewer.