Republish all representations of assemblies & drawings that contain a modified part

[Durbal.Andrew.H]

Assemblies & Drawings created that contain a part in.

All checked in and default representations created.

Check-out, modify and check-in a part that belongs to the assembly.

A new default representation is created for the part.

No new default representations are created for the assemblies & drawings that contain the part. Can this be automated to replublish these?

[NickAdams]

I have noticed this same issue and will be interested in the answer, as out of date images are of little use.

[GregOlson]

Yes, it can be automated to republish out of date reps. I believe the setting is in your wvs.properties (windchill/codebase)...not sure of the exact changes needed. Read: http://yourserver/Windchill/properties.html#WindchillVisualizationServiceProperties. One thing to note....this will create a lot of extra publishing, when we had this turned on our two publishing machines were working 24/7 and the only time they would catch up would be on the weekends. I also warn about turning this function on as you lose eyes on drawings. What I mean by that is once you check something in, an engineer should check the published drawing to make sure that everything looks correct. We have run into instances where it looked correct once published after initial checkin, but after a while due to a automatic republish the drawing lost dimensional references and a supplier made parts that were not correct. This didn't sit well with our quality dept.....so we stopped auto re-publish. The engineers are in charge of checking drawings and republishing were used assys and drawings. This adds a little time, but ensures that every rep in your system is perfect (per engineering and company standards).

Greg

[BillRyan]

I can understand the need to update the representations for the assemblies when lower level components change. I agree with Greg's concerns on Drawings. I would recommend publishing assemblies as positioning assembly. This eliminates the need to republish all where used assemblies when opened in Creo View. There are positives and negatives, but for any company that wants Creo View to open assemblies with the same image as Pro-E(Creo Parametric) session in a collaborative environement, then PA publishing is the best option.

[GregOlson]

Bill, can you explain what a PA is and how it works?

hanks,

Greg

[BillRyan]

Here is my quick explanation:

From the publisher side:

1. The publisher downloads the top level assembly only and opens what is similar to the "assembly only" rep and publishes the location in 3d space and the names of the first level components.
2. .prt files sent to publisher will contain the ".ol" images along with some assemblies that don't publish as positioning assembly. (Hint: advanced method called extended positioning assembly documentation created from PTC on request as this enables publishing of assemblies with cuts, harnesses and flexed components.)
3. We publish on every check-in.

Opening Assembly in Creo View:

1. Recommend having loading set at "autoload single" for very large assemblies.
2. The first level objects in the tree structure and every level of assembly published as postitioning assembly will be interogated upon loading into the creo view session. We have configuration set to latest, so it will grab the latest iteration of the assembly or .prt in WC.
3. With this set-up you can have simplifed reps(viewables) published and/or create simplifed reps in Creo View(annoations) and the latest version of the lower level components will always open in Creo View on future loads. Interference detection, videos...they all have been confirmed to work with this setup.
4. Enabling the cache will save the ".ol" files to your hard drive to enable faster load of the graphics information. Positioning assembly loading in creo view will always go to WC to interrogate the version.

Also, for those that attended PTC live global, there were four presenations on this subject from PACCAR, John Deere and AGCO along with PTC's advanced visualization presentation.

More details of it are in the PTC guide below:

http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/138204/en/WindchillVisualizationServicesGuide_10-1_M040.pdf