13-Aquamarine

Solved

Handling the default precision on numeric attributes from CAD

Forum|Forum|8 days ago
May 5, 2026
6 replies
74 views

Hoping someone might have already solved this one and be willing to share their approach. By default any floating point number passed to an EPMDocument from a CAD file has the precision set to the max (14 I think), which means the value has to show using scientific notation, which is not easy to read. There is a configuration option to ignore precision, but then you lose all precision on all attribute values on all objects, which does not meet our requirements. Ideally I would like to control the display of those particular attributes to limit the number of significant figures, which is going to take some level of customisation. Perhaps modifying the data processor to change rendering for a configured list of attributes, or catching the store of the attribute value and reducing the precision.

Has anyone tackled this issue, able to share any details or lessons learned?

CAD Data Mgmt

Best answer by d_graham

I saw your post and thought this should be a good one to figure out.

In short, rather than have the display be in scientific notation for a specific FloatingPoint attribuite (not all FloatingPoint attributes) you want the entire number written out.

For example, rather than 1E17 you want to see 100,000,000,000,000,000

If I understand you correctly, I have figured out how to do this.

See image below.

David

windchill.developer@yahoo.com

avillanueva

23-Emerald I

Are you just looking to control the display or are you looking to change the value as stored?

L

LewisLawrence

Author

13-Aquamarine

Really just need to control the display, only on the selected numeric attributes we have mapped from CAD to the EPMDocument type definition.

B

BryanK

16-Pearl

Have a look at these 2 kb articles.

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS36590

and

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS44286 for the xconfmanager command

This may help unless the value is something like this 1.00000000045

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS352099

Chances are pretty good that getting it right in the cad system will be the solution.

D

d_graham

Answer

18-Opal

I saw your post and thought this should be a good one to figure out.

In short, rather than have the display be in scientific notation for a specific FloatingPoint attribuite (not all FloatingPoint attributes) you want the entire number written out.

For example, rather than 1E17 you want to see 100,000,000,000,000,000

If I understand you correctly, I have figured out how to do this.

See image below.

David

windchill.developer@yahoo.com

L

LewisLawrence

Author

13-Aquamarine

The scientific notation was only one part of it, the main issue is that a value of 1.50 entered in CAD would show with many trailing zeros on the EPMDocument.