Drawing is more recent than the Model

[audctrl]

The reason escapes me at the moment so this may seem like a silly question to some. I've seen this message on a few drawings now. How can a drawing be more recent than a model if the drawing is a child of the model? Does the chicken really come before the egg?

 

[dgs]

The main reason this happens is when two people are working on the same thing.
<UL>
<LI>Fred is making changes to the drawing, completes his work and saves it.</LI>
<LI>Meanwhile, Joe is changing the model in a separate directory. He completes his work a day before Fred.</LI>
<LI>When Fred's drawing changes are done, Joe copies the model in Windows back into the drawing folder. </LI>
<LI>Now the date stamp on the part is older than the date stamp on the drawing.</LI>[/list]


The purpose of the warning, I think, is so you can check for issues like that. If the model is older than the drawing, something fishy is going on.

 

[audctrl]

Thanks Doug. I think part of it is the fact that our PDM software is not Pro/I. And now that I think about your reply a little more, we can check out drawings and models, only make changes to the drawing and the model gets returned unmodified.


On a side note, do you work in some sort of think tank? I took a look at your website, kind of nice.

 

[dgs]

That's a potentially dangerous scenario because, by default, Pro|E saves any created drawing dimensions in the model, not the drawing. You have to set the config option 'create_drawing_dims_only' to yes to override this behavior. The down side of that is that you cannot then reference any model dims in your created dims using the &dx notation.


Not exactly a 'think tank', but that's close I guess. We are a product development consultancy, involved in everything from brand development to industrial design tofull product engineering. (It all works together, actually.) I'm in the engineering end of things, obviously, but we do all kinds of creative things in all areas of product design in all kinds of markets.


It's fun stuff.

 

[audctrl]

Dimensions created in the drawing get stored in the model? I can see changing the shown dimensions getting stored back into the model, but a dimension created in the drawing stays with the drawing, and if it looses its refs, it turns purple.


Sounds like fun. Get to be creative...

 

[dgs]

Yep, created dims in the drawing get stored in the model. Try this:
<UL>
<LI>Back up a drawing and it's model to an off line folder.</LI>
<LI>Open the drawing and create some dims.</LI>
<LI>Save the drawing. You should now have 2 versions of the drawing and the model on disk.</LI>
<LI>Exit Pro|E.</LI>
<LI>Delete the newer of the two models from disk.</LI>
<LI>Re-start Pro|E and re-open the saved drawing.</LI>[/list]


You'll note that the dims you created are gone. That's because they were stored in the model file you deleted.


We've been bitten by this in the past.Someone willtry to get ahead of schedule by having Fred work on the drawing while Joe finishes the model. All of Fred's work gets lost when Joe's model is pulled into the drawing. Ends up costing time instead of saving it.


I think they did this to enable the re-use of model dims inside drawing dims.


------------------------------------------


Not just get to be creative, have to be. It's our reason for existence. Companies come to us because off our creativity. Innovation is what we sell, not just design or engineering. It's not all bleeding edge stuff (I'm working on a simple sheetmetal electronics enclosure right now - but it's a pretty cool one.

), but it's still pretty fun.

 

[audctrl]

I tried that. Interesting..... I guess it is a good thing we use "Shown" dimensions. And for this situation we have a program that compares one viewable to another so one can easily see which dimensions fell off so to speak. Thanks again for your help and I learned something in the process.


Nice sound like a place I'd be interested in. Ahh makes me remember the days just after leaving the 2D world where we created newmodels and drawings for every change to a part. How nice would that be to just have a stack of 2D drawings that needed to be loaded into Pro....