Modify partial of the Creo instances without checking out the entire family table

[bbusschers]

Hello,

Looking for some advice regarding working with Family tables in Creo and Windchill.
We are working for some parts and assemblies with relatively large Familye Tables. (15 inst +)
When updating one instance of these family tables, we know have to check-out all
of the instances of this table and perform a set state if needed too.
After that we can check-in the modified instance inclusive all the not modified instances.
(causing an itteration uplift)
I have read an article about the use of the config option: save_implicitly_verified_insts, which can be set on "NO".
When set on NO you are able to check-in only the modified instance and the generic.
But I am a little bit unsure if that is the way to go.
Why is that not advised as best practice or are there better ways to solves this problem?
Many thanks for your advice in advance.

regards,
Bert Busschers
Benchmark

[joe_morton]

What version of Creo are you using? I'm not familiar with that setting.. this article says it applies to Creo 1-6? 

In my experience, Engineers tend to like Family Tables because they can help create designs faster. Admins tend to not like Family Tables because of the change management and possibility for errors. In my organization, we discourage the use, but we do have a library of family table parts for hardware.

If you consistently do all operations to the entire family table (check out, check in, etc.) you should never hit any issues. I think this is why it's a good general rule to always process them together. There are some cases where you can run into issues if you don't process the entire Family Table. 

The case you describe should work though. I believe you can checkout just the Generic and the Instance(s) to be modified, and then check them in. I don't think any settings changes are required for that. I'm pretty sure we've done that as far back as Creo 4.

If you have a test environment, I'd recommend testing the new procedure. If you break a family table, it can be a big headache.

[BenLoosli]

I have always modified the entire family table when I have to make any changes to the instances. 15 instances is a small family table. Some of mine have over 1000 instances in them. While I do not have to make changes in them often, I find that regenerating the entire family table to be beneficial to avoid potential errors. It also helps to keep them in the latest version of Creo. I will be doing a complete regeneration of the family tables when we eventually go to Creo 11 because I can get rid of my complex relations for generating real-to-string variables used in part descriptions.

One other thing is that our family tables are in the Library and not in the general context. This limits who can make changes to the hardware tables, basically only me, and it also allows us to set Windchill so Library parts are added to workspaces as read-only parts.