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I'm looking for a super simple way to communicate superseded information to non-CAD users. We have a (reasonably large) group of users that use Windchill just to pull PDFs and other derivative files (STEP, DXF, etc.), and when they do it is only from a simplified 'Google style' search page. They are typically not navigating to the details page of an object and I wouldn't dream of asking them try to navigate to other tabs for usage or occurrence information. I would like to simply add a column to the search results showing what object should be used in place of the superseded object
We don't currently use WTParts and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go down that road just to get the out-of-the-box superseded functionality. From what I'm reading on the community (here and here), it doesn't sound like this information is very easy to display even if WT Parts are used. Instead I'm imagining something like a global attribute that could be set on the superseded object with the name and a hyperlink to the object it has been replaced shown in a separate column. Has anyone ever done something like this? Is it possible for a global attribute to automatically include a hyperlink to the object reference of some other Windchill object? Just trying to think through my options...
This is what these non-CAD users currently see. I'd like to get 'superseded by' information included.
Hello,
I am getting your requirement. In the search result page you need a link to a superseded CAD Object. One implementation option is by writing datautility and convert the global value string to a hyperlink object.
User will able to search those objects and they will have a link to navigate to superseded object.
A word of caution , data utility will be called for each row. Search result table display performance will reduce by this.
Regards
Ajit
Have you looked at watermarking the drawing PDFs with the state and 'superseded by'? Could be another way to communicate that info.
I already watermark the PDFs with 'Superseded' but I do not currently include any replacement information. I guess I could, but I was kind of hoping to make this information easily visible from the search results without having to open each drawing separately.
Very interesting use case. I believe the issue you have is that it's not an attribute value you can just populate in a search result column.
You might need to create a custom data utility to cast the values into a custom attribute for the object(s).