Removing large numbers of instances from family tables
I am close to finishing a procedure for removing large numbers of instances from family tables and purging out of PDMLink. This follows loosely TPI 141775 <">https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=141775> . The problem is that the TPI does not scale. What if I had to delete 100 instances, or a 1000? The TPI has the user open all the instances to be deleted into session while the deletion occurs in the table. Pro/E would probably crash if I did 1000.
I figured out that all that is necessary is to save a model to the workspace with the same filename as the instances that were removed from the family table. For this I could use excel to get the filenames that I am removing and feed that into a script that makes copies of the start part (any model will do). Then I use the Import to workspace feature to load all those models into the workspace. Now the upload will fail but it is overridable. The resulting check in below shows the instances are standalone now. Returning to the TPI, now I have to purge the history and delete the standalone models.
Why does this matter? In testing we found two facts:
* The percentage of models we use from our family table (milspec parts) is rather low. <12% in most cases. Some families can be 800-1700 instances. * Regardless of how many models and/or instances are downloaded to a workspace, workspace operations are affected by the total number of family table instances that exists in the system. So if you had 1 instance out of 1000 added to your workspace, a sync operation still processes (on the server) the 999 other instances. You pay either way.
