Best Practices for Creo Drawing Formats (.FRM) in Windchill

Training. Training. Training!

The users need to be taught that  formats belong to the system,  not for them to play with and rename. I put our formats in a Windchill library and that makes the files read-only when loaded into a user workspace.

No easy way to fix. Have any user that puts a bad format on a drawing fix his own mistake.

With ModelCheck, turn on DO NOT check-in with errors and have the system check for valid format names. Any other format name would be an error and prevent check-in until fixed.

Make engineering management aware that the users under them are NOT following established guidelines and procedures required for Windchill to function properly. Write out the  things that you do not want the users to do, have engineering management sign off on the document and distribute to all users with the understanding that infractions will be reported to their managers.

Maybe a little tough at first, but they will learn.

Maybe give out a 'broken-finger award' to the user with the most issues during a week or month. I use a picture of a broken finger for my award to a user who does something dumb. The last one I gave out was for going on vacation with Creo open and files not checked in when we went on a 2 week vacation.

The problem is only, if an administrator wants to do a save as from the drawing frame, then he also can't enable it.

If you would like to hide the rows you need to exchange the following line (twice)

//item.setExcluded(true, true);
item.setHidden(true, true);

Hiding the formats from Windchill Save As is probably a good idea. If admins want to do a Save As of the formats, they can do so from Creo. This will be done very infrequently so I think that's a fair trade off.

I could see wanting to setup something similar for the Move, Rename, Set State, etc. commands (exclude or hide by default). Is the code easy to adapt?

I'm not sure, at the moment I have just modified the save as javascript. The challenge is to figure out the right place to add the code, since all actions have other method names.

Set state shouldn't be a problem. Move the frames to a library where the user just has read permission.

sir same problem for me also please explain me 

i already saved the format (.frm) in windchil it is also released in state in windchil,,,after that i create one new drawing (.drw) .but when i try to save that drawing the .frm also came like above picture....

is there any possile to break dependency or copy the(.frm) after paste into drawing(.drw)..

please anyone tell me

Hi,

Have you tried creating a Library for the Formats, and using that location as base for the format for the drawing? Then the format already lives in PDMLink, and won't be picked for check in.