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I have a user who insists that there is no need to strengthening dims and constraints
when breaking external references. He says if he simply locks them, that's good enough. I'm trying to encourage best practices. Comments?
I believe when you lock a dimension it makes it strengthens it as well. If they are not locked or strong and that is your design intent, proe can eliminate those dimensions and add others in without you knowing.
Dear Dick_S,
providing strong dimensions to the design is MANDATORY.
Because Pro E is parametric software.
A good design engineer always prefer to fully constrain his/her design by providing optimum strong dimensions.
Your design will not be stable without strong dimensions.
Well it's certainly good practice to get you design intent
just the way you want it but to say that strong dimensions
are MANDATORY is simply not true.
It is only mandatory that the sketch is fully constrained.
LOCKED dimensions and STRONG dimensions are different things.
# Locked dimensions: Locking of dimensions allows you to avoid modifications made to the sections outside the sketcher mode by accidentally dragging a vertex or an entity.
# Strong dimensions: That fully constrains the sketch, that is one of the best practice for a good designer.You are allowed to keep weak dimensions, but then you are a WEAK designer
@toonyank: When sketch is fully constrained, all dimensions in sketch are strong.
Coming to original post: My opinion is to have all dimensions STRONG.Making it LOCKED is all on you.I recommend LOCKING them only when some kids are working
OK, I checked out what bfairhurst said in the beginning. If you lock weak dims and then unlock them, you will see that they have become strong. (yellow, not gray). But what about weak constraints? Mustn't they also need to be strengthened?
Need to be from what standpoint? your sketch will work with weak dimensions, I do not recommened it as this will not be a robust model. I would recommend never leaving weak dimensions in a sketch.
I thnk we're all talking past each other. There are
three things at play here - a fully constrained sketch,
strong dims and locked dims.
Fully constrained simply means that every sketch entity
is positioned to existing geometry or datums. You cannot
create a sketch in Pro/E that is not fully constrained
because Pro/E will add dims to constrain the sketch.
Those dims will be weak, but they still constrain the
sketch and define how it will behave when the underlying
geometry changes.
Weak dims then are simply the dims that Pro/E adds to
constrain the sketch. There is no difference between weak
and strong except that Pro/E will remove weak dims
without warning if a sketch is over constrained. Strong
dims require user acceptance for Pro/E to remove them.
Locked dims behave similarly to strong dims in that you
have to accept their removal if the sketch becomes over
constrained, but additionally will not allow the
dimension value to change by dragging the sketch. Strong
and weak dims will.
Personally, I want all dims either strong or locked as
this tells the user that the sketch is as I want it, not
as Pro/E made it.
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