Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

Keeping track of parts/assemblies.

danu

New member
The other day I created a part and saved it with the same name (six digit number) as an existing assembly. I only noticed after both drawings were released for manufacturing.That creates problems with the manufacturer and for us in the master parts list.


Is there any way to prevent that from happening? Thanks for all replies


P.S. I use SW 08.
Edited by: danu
 
I don't know of a way to have SW or PDMWorks prevent that from happening. As I see it, there are only two ways to prevent this:


1.Add some intellegenceto the way you pull numbers (prefix, or something like that). The drawback is that the number log is no longer just a simple rolling log.


2. Put intelligence into the dash number, if you use them. This has the advantage that the drawing number log remains simple, and the master parts list will be reasonably assured that there will be no duplicated part numbers. This only works if you use the part number = drawing number + dash number scheme.


As far as preventing the duplication of drawing numbers, at my company, we have a sharedexcel spreadsheet with a macro that allows someone to save, pull a number, then save again with the push of a button. This allows access by multiple people, but prevents duplicate numbers from being pulled. Two people have to run the macro at exactly the same time for there to be problems, and this hasn't happened yet, although we only had four users. This may not work if you have more than 50 users (excel may limit the number of people acessing it at once).


The advantage is that anyone with reasonable excel experience can use it, which is almost everyone; and fine tuning it can be easily done with just basic macro knowledge.
 
If you use more than 1 folder, SSLaser has right. SW can't prevent the duplicate names.


My opinion is to use, ACCES instead EXCEL. That because the PRIMARY KEY or indexescan prevent duplicates names. ACCES can do more: you can define a field like a LINK to the folder where you putthe file(or to the file itself). In this way you can find quckly any file you want.


Good luck !


Mihail
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top