Re: PDMLink and Creo Publishing

borourke · ‎Apr 20, 2017

We are starting to load larger Creo models and assemblies into PDMLink, and were wondering what most do or best practices when it comes to publishing. We are looking to move the publishing to after hours, but a problem we are seeing are the representations being created. A few of the models are rapidly changing(iterations over 100), and each time they are checked out/in, the entire model is published and not just the few changes. We get stacked publishing jobs that take a couple of hours each and the representations are filling up the file vaults. Just wondering if there are properties we can set cut down on the representations being produced and maybe speeding up the publish jobs. Many thanks for any info!

MikeLockwood · ‎Apr 20, 2017

We had publishing done automatically on check-in but it was getting overloaded, so as you suggest, we disabled. Users request publish as needed during the day. We have a scheduled job which runs every night and picks up all that didn't get published already. Seems to be working very well.

TomU · ‎Apr 20, 2017

You may want to consider using extended positioning assemblies for your assembly publishing. This has made a huge difference for us both in terms of publishing time and file size. The other option is to add more CAD workers. We have 15 workers running on the same virtual machine. As long as you throw enough virtual RAM and CPU at it, it works great (and only requires 1 node-locked license.) During heavy publishing we can output one job per second, on average.

jherendeen · ‎Apr 21, 2017

15 CAD workers!?! We're using 2 are rarely fall behind when publishing on check in. Impressive.

Can you explain the "extended positioning assemblies"?

mpersson · ‎Apr 21, 2017

This is how we handle publish.

-Using Publish rules and set rules to not publish unwanted models and which output you want for different types of publish. For example, for check-in event we publish asm and drw, no prt. PDF is only published when publish is pushed from workflow.

-Use Position assemblies on top levels.

-Use scheduled Purge jobs. Our database was growing like hell without using purge. Took months of purge jobs to get to decent level.

To get it working the core is to have good methods for release of objects. You do not want purge to ruin too many as stored configurations.

MikeLockwood · ‎Apr 21, 2017

Please tell me more about purging published jobs.

Does this remove the vaulted files for non-latest versions?

TomU · ‎Apr 21, 2017

DarrenStorey · ‎Apr 21, 2017

I'll second that. Positioning assemblies made a huge difference for us. If only we could use them with UG NX also.

While still publishing models on each check-in, we only publish drawings once they have been promoted. This also helped a lot, not just by managing throughput but also by improving the reliability of publish jobs. Work in progress drawings were the main culprit for failed jobs, and nobody needed a rep for a half-finished drawing.

Drawing publish jobs are triggered programmatically from promotion workflow and subsequent workflow tasks are not delivered until the jobs have successfully completed. This mean we no longer deliver assignments to check drawing reps which are still waiting to be published or have failed to publish, something which often frustrated and annoyed people.