Why does windchill reserve a partnumber when doing "save as" and select "step file"

[MC_9352069]

When doing "save as" in Creo, a new windchill partnumber is reserved. When one now selects the "step-file" format. The old partnumber is reused. The reserved partnumber, is now gone forever. This partnumber is not reused. it is just gone.

The same problem happens when copying parts
Suppose I have an assembly with 500 parts. Now I want to make a copy of this assembly. In this copy I want to change one part. This theoratically should require only 2 new part numbers. One number for the copied assembly and one new number for the changed part. However, Creo / Windchill will first reserve 501 new part number. Of this I will use 2 new part numbers and 499 of the old ones. Now the problem is that those 499 partnumbers are un-used and lost forever.

We are now running windchill for 4 years and have 2 active users. With the two of us we have created about 60.000 partsnumbers. Most of those are not used. This is getting silly.

Is there a way / setting where the partnumbers get only reserved if they actually get used?

We are running Creo 8.3

[BenLoosli]

Windchill OIR rules are creating the new numbers on the fly as you request a save-as and then tossing away any numbers not actually used in the save-as process. This has been discussed many times over the years, as far back as Windchill 7. Since Windchill does not know how many parts you actually want to rename in your save-as, it assigns new numbers to all in the save-as table and then discards the unused ones. The number generation is driven from the database in a sequence table. You may notice some skipping of numbers too, unless you have modified the database to eliminate the skips.

The only solution is to write a custom handler for the rename operation that allows you to control the new numbers OR do not use autogenerated numbering. Since most companies have a defined numbering scheme, they usually do not use the autogenerated numbers as they don't fit into their scheme. We have Windchill set so that a rename uses the original part number and appends an '_' to the end. Then it is up to the engineer to delete those parts that do not get new numbers and to assign proper numbers to those that do.

[MC_9352069]

Hi Ben,

Thank you for your response. When copying and assembly, Windchill is setup such it suggest the new number for the assembly and it reuses the old numbers for the parts underneath the assembly, Then one can select whether one wants to do a "save as" on the parts below the assembly as well, or not, Logical. However windchill still reserves a number for each part in the assembly and those numbers are gone even if they are not used. This is not logical to me. I would say the system should only pull a new number at the time I indeed select to do a "save as" in the individual parts as well.

If the problem could be fixed by setting a flag differently somewhere, I could do this. However I am not be able to write a custom handler since I don't have the knowledge nor the time, and our company is too small to have other resources to fix this problem. I guess we will have to live with this issue as is. this shouldn't be a problem either since if each user generates 9.900 empty parts a year and 100 good parts, then we will have about 80.000 man-years left before we run out of numbers 🙂

[avillanueva]

You are using auto-assigned numbering? Have you considered assigning numbers manually? I think behind the scenes, Windchill is pre-assigning from the Oracle sequence. That is a feature of using a sequence, once they are requested, regardless if they are used, the counter moved forward. You can imagine what happens if you have simultaneous transactions on a live system.  Consider cases like reserving concert tickets. While you are getting your credit card, someone swoops in and claims your seats. Not good. Sequence keeps moving forward to avoid conflicts similar to this. 

[MC_9352069]

Hi Avillanueva,

Thank you for your response, it is much appreciated.

Manual numbering might give us different problems. I am not extremely versed in Windchill hence pretty reluctant to change the out-the-box settings. We can life with the huge amount of waste in the use of the numbers. I just thought there might be a simple solution, and if so, I would implement that. However, judging from yours and Ben's response I now believe it is possibly better to leave it as is.

Regards

Matthe

[TomU]

There is an existing product idea.  Please vote it up.

Autonumbering in Creo Parametric - Don't Consume N... - Page 2 - PTC Community