Methodology Familytable

[trafikfara]

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Is there some best practices or methodology documented around use of Pro/ENGINEER Family tables with a PDMLink system?
a.User restrictions, Set up user rights in PDMLink for instances
b.Performance

Thanks in advance

 

[AaronMejia]

We are currently using PDMLink 9.0 and, for the most part, Family tables work fine. I would only add a few things to keep in mind:
<UL>
<LI>Check out the generic AND all instances every time, even if you are only working with one of the instances. It will save you some headaches down the road</LI>
<LI>When adding a new instance in the family table, make sure you make a new revision of the generic and then you add the new instance. If, for some reason, you need to delete the last iteration that has the newly created instance, PDMLink won't let you delete it because it would be the last iteration of the revision (vers. 0.1). The way to do it is to delete the latest revision, that would take care of deleting that last iteration too. This particular issue gave me a hard time recently.</LI>
<LI>Always verify the family table members before check in. Just do it.</LI>
<LI>Publication will likely fail if one of the instances is checked out by either you or someone else. Make sure none of the instances nor the generic are checked out before publication.</LI>
<LI>You may run into regeneration errors during publication. One of the most common causes is that one of the instances of the family table is referencing a feature that is suppressed in the generic. This one is hard to spot, but running ModelCheck Regenerate in your model can help you to identify this and some other issues.</LI>
<LI>When adding new instances, just make sure you don't use references that are suppressed / frozen in other instances. This would cause circular references and/or missing references that may not fail in Pro/E, but will freeze components and that may cause publication failures.</LI>[/list]


That's all I can think of right now. I hope it helps.