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findmymother

bunterhund

New member
recently I had a problem to find assemblies which belong to a part I know. This is my solution without Intralink.2007-04-05_092059_findmymother_engl.zip


When you work with the explorer you can rightclick the file and then "open with..." and then this findmymother.exe. Then this tool will find the assembly when it
 
Well, I scanned it for viruses and didn't find any. Who is going to be brave enough to extract and use it?

Bunterhund - how about a findmydrawing.exe?
 
I braved it. It works nicely. I was literally just thinking about this yesterday. My company uses a folder system to keep track of files, as we only have a few users right now. This is a simple way to be sure you're updating what needs to be updated, etc. I think this will be useful on a daily basis until we move to a data management system.
 
Hi dr_gallup ! findmymother is also a findmydrawing, because you can choose (in the criterion box)what kind of Pro/E file type you want to get. Just choose "drw" than "asm" and typethe name of the file into the textbox. ok??


[EDIT] Geocities is closing later this year, so you
 
When you open a part file using this program (you do this through Windows Explorer's Open With... option), a dialog box appears with a list of all of the part's parent assemblies. You can also then click on an option which will show you all of the part's parent drawings.


We are still using a folder system for our Pro-E files, so this givesus a way to make surewe're not messing anything up whenwe rename a part. We can pull everything up before we rename.
 
After running a search and finding a drawing or assembly, there is a button labeled "see it". What is this supposed to do? It does not appear to do anything on my machine.

Is it really any better than using Windoze Exploder built in SEARCH command? I can at least drag and drop those results into the active Pro/E session.
 
I don't have a button labeled "see it". Interesting...


It's just a way to find parents quickly. All it's doing is looking for the connections between files. If you have a data management system this may be totally useless.


Strange about that button, though.
 
It sounds like it first of all needs a search path to work and then interrogates every drawing and assembly to find if they use the particular part you are using.


This could take an enormous amount of time on our server where we have over 10,000 assemblies and over 60,000 drawings.
 
Probably.


I guess the real question is whether or not you have the potential for problems when changing or renaming parts. If you have some form of protection - through a data management system, for example - this may be completely irrelevant to you.


Right now it's coming in handy here, since we're still using a folder system, and right now this is our sole way of tracking down these connections...
 
For us, any parts that are used in more than one assembly (common parts) carry a different type of part number than any other that makes them easy to identify. These are NEVER renamed. For that matter, the ONLY time that anything is renamed is during the design phase, prior to drawing release.
 
Unfortunately, we're in the middle of implementing both Pro-E and a new ERP system. We'll be renaming almost all of our parts soon, in part to have a situation like you're describing, where common parts have a different type ofnumber.


Guess what our intern will be doing this summer?
smiley1.gif



The only advantage we have is that we only have two full-time users right now, so we haven't generated a huge number of parts - yet.
 
We have lots of parts that are used in lots of related products and we don't use any kind of PDM system. As a rule, we don't rename parts but when we need to it is vital to know what assemblies and drawing reference the parts. I have just always used the windows explorer search command which does a decent job. I was just wondering how FINDMYMOTHER is better. The one thing that I can do with a windows search is drop the drawings and assemblies into an active Pro/E session so they can be saved after the rename.

Even if you are not renaming parts or assemblies, it can be vital to know where they are used if you are making changes. Not good to fix one problem and create ten unintended problems!
 
dr_gallup, how do you use Explorer to find parents? I can find a file using it, I can find a file containing text from the file I'm searching for, but I have no idea how to search for a file containing another file. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, since I don't know this technique. I'm certainly willing to try both and give you a comparison...
 
In the "Search for files named" box type *.asm.* or *.drw.*

Then in the "Containing Text" box type in the name of your Pro/E part or assembly up to the first dot (.)

I am sure findmymother is using the same technique with a GUI wrapper.

Pro/E stores all the referenced objects in ascii text in the header of the file. You used to be able to edit the header and fix a file if one of the objects had been renamed. PTC eliminated this handy capability by adding a checksum to the file so if you edit it Pro/E will report the file as corrupted.
 

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