Practical method or best practice for working with Intelligent Fastener components in Windchill?

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Has anyone come up with a practical method or best practice for working with Intelligent Fastener components in Windchill? IFX Lite is available in the Schools Edition of Creo Parametric and many of the FIRST teams designing their robot in Creo Parametric are using it. The main issue is dealing with all the instances created for the primary fasteners. Would it be better to bulk load all the fasteners first or just let them get added as they are used?

Typically the kids don't need to worry about the Update Download/Reuse options since they are not using many common components, but IFX definitely brings this issue front and center. Curious if anyone has a best practice for using common components when they are not fetched from Windchill?

Is there a config.pro setting to tell Creo Parametric where the fasteners are located? Would be great if we could point it to Windchill instead of the install folder.

[TomU]

Scott Morris,

There is a knowledge base article and learning exchange video showing how to pre-load the IFX models into Windchill.  You definitely want to do this before users start manually uploading themselves (all over the place).

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS183030

http://learningexchange.ptc.com/tutorial/4154/loading-ptc-creo-intelligent-fastener-library-into-windchill

[OliverGräbner]

Hi Scott,

if you work together with Windchill, then it will be the best to upload all the fastener instances you need to Windchill first.

1. Cleanup your library. Remove unused catalogs and fasteners
2. Create Instances. Use the instance creater in the IFX group
3. Upload all the fastener parts to Windchill
4. Remove the fastener parts from your local environment (created instances and the templates)

If you now assemble a fastener with IFX it is loaded from Windchill.

Hope this helps.

You find more helpful information in our Group Intelligent Fastener Extension - IFX‌