Forum Discussion

ben_colley's avatar
ben_colley
Ideator I
8 years ago

Making CAD Documents Slave to Parts

Hello All, I'm in the midst of setting up our Innovator environment for doing PDM and PLM. We're currently on SP9 (soon to be SP12), and use Solidworks with the Softech Connector. I'm trying to keep things fairly simple, and we're intending to use the Part item as the master file for everything. Because of this, every CAD Document will have an associated Part object. I'd like to keep the change control properties of the CAD Document slave to the Part it's associated with, such that the Revision and State are locked and move together. We'll be using a slightly modified Express ECO process for change control, to do both Release and Change. Could someone please advise as to the best way to implement this (or if it's a bad idea, try to talk me out of it)? I can think of a few options, my best two guesses are either using an existing or new relationship between the items to link the properties with a method, or by implementing some rules and functions in the code for the Express ECO process. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Ben

1 Reply

  • christopher_gillis's avatar
    christopher_gillis
    Community Manager
    8 years ago
    Hello, While I haven't seen a customer implement this exact use case before, we have had customers use custom versioning logic previously. In those cases, we've recommended creating two custom properties "my_custom_rev" and "my_custom_generation" to track your revisions that won't be affected by the built-in versioning logic of Aras Innovator. There are a number of different ways to achieve the result you're looking for, but one idea would be to take advantage of the standard Part CAD relationship and create an onAfterAdd/onAfterUpdate server event that makes sure that your custom version properties of your child CAD items always match those of the parent Part. Chris ____________________________ Christopher Gillis Aras Labs Software Engineer