Aligning parts and designs

A business part typically has a design solution developed for it. The business part and the design solution may have different lifecycles. A part may have several design representations, for example, in the case of flexible parts. Conversely, a design model may apply to multiple parts, for example, colored parts. Also, users may create independent part and design structures, then organize and manage them separately. When the design structure and the part structure are independent these different views of the same product must be reconciled. The action of aligning or reconciling the structures in this way is referred to as publishing occurrence data. For example, some part occurrences may use positioned designs and you need to align each such part occurrence with a design occurrence that is positioned in the context of the product. Alignment allows you to visualize the positioned design from the part structure itself. You can optionally automate the alignment so that when the user creates a design, Teamcenter automatically creates the corresponding part. To do this, you define the source, target, and relationship of the automated creation process in the Business Modeler IDE, for example, Part, Design and TC_Is_Represented_by. You can also use custom source and target types. Alternatively, you can configure the creation of a design to initiate a workflow that notifies a part engineer to manually create the corresponding part.

Note Automation fails if you do not specify an object naming rule for the target attribute. For example, Teamcenter cannot automatically create a text dataset if you do not specify the name it should give the new dataset. In this situation, consider using property mapping, that is, the text dataset may inherit the object name of the source design object if you configure the Fnd0InheritFrom business object constant accordingly. When you create a business object (for example, an item), there may be certain attributes that cannot be null. If these attributes are not specified, object creation fails. If you are creating a business object manually, the Finish button is not enabled if you do not enter all the required values. However, if you are automatically creating the target object, the user is not required to enter target object values; for example, the designer may not be aware of part attributes because the design creation dialog box does not show part attributes. To address this issue, you can do one of the following: Provide default values for required and mandatory attributes. Write custom code through a post action on the finalizeCreateInput operation of the target object. For instance, if you are automating part creation, write a post action on the finalizeCreateInput operation of the part. You publish occurrence data between source and destination occurrences of two representations. Teamcenter takes a snapshot of the source occurrence data and creates a publish link to the destination occurrence. For example, you can publish an absolute transform from a source design occurrence to a destination part occurrence, ensuring the shape is correctly positioned in the product. If the source occurrence data was already published, Teamcenter updates the snapshot with the new information. Depending on your business practices, you can align a design occurrence to more than one part occurrence. Teamcenter may automatically mark one of the part occurrences as the primary, based on an assessment of the maturity of the design occurrence and its latest revision. The maturity of the design revision is set with the Mature Statuses global constant in the Business Modeler IDE. Users may also manually set a design occurrence as the primary. Part and design occurrences must be reconciled when the same context is set in both structures. For example, in the design structure, the designer positions a wheel in the WheelAssembly assembly; that is, the left front wheel is positioned in the context of WheelAssembly. Also, the WheelAssembly assembly is itself positioned in the context of the Car product; that is, the left front wheel is positioned in the context of Car. If you require the positioned design of the part occurrence denoting the left front wheel of the car, you must reconcile the design occurrence of the left front wheel in the Car context. Before publishing the occurrence data, you therefore set the context of both structures to Car. When you revise a part, the associated designs are propagated to the new revision.

Note If you are automating the creation of a design when a part is created, be aware that the part object has a Design Required Boolean attribute. If this is set to false, the design may not be aligned to a part. Consequently, you should not use this default attribute on the master form to trigger a condition.

Note If you visualize a JT file attached to the part structure, Teamcenter first looks for the JT file associated to the part occurrence. However, it does not traverse from the part occurrence to the design occurrence. Consequently, if no JT file exists for the part occurrence, it then looks at the associated primary design revision for a JT file.