Represent Drawings as PDF keeping Thumbnail

Folks,

Thanks to some email feedback I thought I should clarify a few things. Out of the box the Pro E CAD Worker is configured to produce HPGL output, when that configuration is used the resulting representation of a Pro E “Number.drw” EPM Document includes the following files:

Wvspvp.pvp
Number_drw.plt
Number_drw.pvs
Number_drw.jpg (shown in the thumbnail on the epm doc properties page)
Number_drw_small.jpg (shown when browsing folders)

The CAD Worker configuration can be modified by editing the Pro E CAD Worker “Proe2pv.rcp” file, setting it to produce pdf. If this configuration is used the resulting representation of a Pro E “Number.drw” EPM Document only includes the following files:

Wvspvp.pvp
Number_drw.pdf
Number_drw.pvs

Clearly without the JPG files nothing shows up in the thumbnail or when browsing folders, and that is what we are trying to fix.

Has anyone successfully done this?

Can anyone point me at the actual Pro E file/action/script/whatever that uses the recipe file?

-----

Lewis

We made the same jump to publishing PDFs when we updated to M050. Though we use SolidWorks as our primary CAD app, we ran in to the same problem. Working with our reseller, we arrived at the conclusion of "you can't (easily) get there from here".

We really liked having the thumbnails images of drawings show up in search results and on the info page...but the desire to have a PDF auto-published for downstream use won out over having that thumbnail image as a quick reference.

Of course, on this point, we be very happy if there was an easy way to configure the system to do both and let them do their respective jobs.

Tech support has pretty much told us that “it is working as designed”.

What is frustrating is that to produce the pdf files, the drw file is being loaded into session (command line at least) in Pro E and then exported/printed to pdf. I have to assume that getting Pro E to export/print the JPG files at the same time should not be too difficult.

Does anyone know the actual sequence of events the CAD Worker uses?

-----

Lewis

I received a couple of informative emails explaining that the thumbnail production in Windchill is handled by a Thumbnail service that runs as part of the install. This service uses the Productview file provided by the CAD Worker as input. That is why configuring the Worker to only output PDF files loses the thumbnails.

So it seems our only options might be to;
1) Create two representations, one PDF and one PLT and let the out of the box process work as intended. Then customize the EPMDocument page to provide a link to the PDF representation from there.
2) Modify the thumbnail service and add functionality so that PDF files of drawings are somehow used to produce JPG files.

.-----

Lewis