Nasty Family Tables

[RonGrabau]

I have a problem that is really perplexing me and PTC support. I am hoping someone out here may have a solution.

I have a family table with 2 instances that are in a library container. A user renamed one instance and checked in a new iteration. All is good up to this point.

Somehow, user2 must have had a copy in workspace that was out of date. That version contained the 2 versions each with the original name. For some reason, this user was allowed by PDMLink to check in this version.

So I have ended up with the latest iteration having the same names as I started. Unfortunately the one instance that was actually renamed shows up as a new instance.

So the renamed instance is used in multiple assemblies but retrieving these assemblies causes an out of date instance of the part to be retrieved. I cannot update the family table since this part is not found in the latest iteration.

To make things even worse, I cannot delete the latest iteration of the object. I get the error stating that I cannot delete the only iteration of the part that was added to the latest generic. I cannot delete all revisions because the ealier iteration is used in assemblies. I cannot check in another family table instance since the names are already used.

I just want to delete the latest iteration but I don't seem to have an option to do so.

Has anyone else run across this problem and more so, have a fix?

Ronald B. Grabau
ME Applications Engineer
HP - Houston

[kpritchard]

Ran into similar with Instance Revisions... later Rev generic with earlier Rev Instance andearlierRev Generic with later Rev Instance. Ican't remember what actually worked, but I suspect it was probably Purge.It had branched (I wish there was a setting to prevent branching) and Ihad to go backwards on both branches to the split point before things could move forward cleanly.

[jellis]

Ron...I think you're going to have to Delete the 'where used' assemblies with the renamed instance to permit the ability to purge the generic back to where it was originally. To minimize lost work maybe back up the assemblies in their current state minus the renamed instance. Delete all the trouble filesand then begin the recovery process.

Regards, Jim

[RonGrabau]

Well, after looking around a lot and getting some help from PTC support I derived upon a solution. PTC sent me several TANs that stated that I should be able to fix the issue. Each time I tried the TAN I got stuck and could not proceed.

I finally figured that if PTC says it should be done and I know it could be done in Intralink, I figured that there had to be a preference that was preventing me from making the change. It ended up that I needed to change a preference from the Organization Utilities since you don't see the option as a personal preference for some reason.

The preference is:Allow checkout of non-latest iterations. I set it from Do not allow... to Throw an overrideable conflict... you can also set it to Allow...

With this change, I was able to check out the missing instance in the earlier iteration of the family table and make it a generic. This fixed my problem.

I am now trying to figure out Purge and how to get rid of the family table all together but that is another issue.

Thanks for the support and suggestions.

Ronald B. Grabau
ME Applications Engineer
HP - Houston