Aligning CAD designs and parts

At some stage of its life cycle, a business part typically has a design solution developed for it. The business part and the design solution may have different life cycles.

• One part may have several corresponding design representations, for example, flexible parts.

• Conversely, a single design model can represent multiple parts, for example, colored parts. Also, you may want to organize the part structure and the design structure differently, depending on your business practices.

When the part and the design structures are independent, you must reconcile these two views of the product. For an occurrence of part, you must know the corresponding positioned design; that is the occurrence of the design positioned in the context of the product. Likewise, you may want to visualize the positioned design from the part structure; that is, reconcile the position and shape needed from the design.

You can align any types of items that are appropriate for your business practices, for example, parts with CAD designs, or parts with documents.

• You can globally associate a part and a design, in which case all revisions of the part and design are automatically associated. The association between the items is revision independent.

• Alternatively, you can choose to evaluate the alignment each time the part or design is revised. This configuration ensures the design can always be correctly visualized wherever it occurs in the structure.

Caution

Before aligning items, ensure that master forms are attached to all item and item revision business objects. Otherwise, the alignment process may be unsuccessful.

You can optionally automate the alignment so that when the user creates a design, Teamcenter automatically creates the corresponding part. To do this, you define the source, target, and relationship of the automated creation process in the Business Modeler IDE, for example, Part, Design and TC_Is_Represented_by. You can also use custom source and target types. Alternatively, you can configure the creation of a design to trigger a workflow that notifies a part engineer to manually create the corresponding part.

• When you revise a part, you decide whether to carry forward existing associations with design revisions. By default, all associations with Represented By relationships are carried forward. Conversely, when you create a new revision of a design, the existing associations with parts are not carried forward by default. This allows the designer to determine manually when to make the new revision visible to the BOM engineer.

• To allow automatic propagation of a new design revision to the associated part revision, add a TC_Is_Represented_By,Part Revision,LookLeft string to the AutoCopyRel business object constant on the design revision object with the Business Modeler IDE. However, propagating the design revision to the part revision does not automatically make it the primary revision, that is, the revision displayed in the viewer. The primary revision is controlled by the maturity level, as described later.

Note

Automatic propagation assumes an association between a single design and a single part. If a design revision is associated with several revisions of the same part, the latest mature revision is carried forward. If a design revision is associated with revisions of different parts, nothing is propagated.

After aligning the structures, you publish the occurrence data.

• You publish occurrence data between source and destination absolute occurrences of two representations. Teamcenter takes a snapshot of the source occurrence data and creates a publish link to the destination occurrence. For example, you can publish transform and shape information from a source design occurrence to a destination part occurrence. If the source occurrence data is already published, Teamcenter updates the snapshot with the new information.

• A publish link may associate a source design occurrence with more than one target part occurrence. For simplicity, the following procedures assume you are working with a single target part occurrence, but multiple targets are permitted depending on your product structure.

Note

If you associate multiple targets, Teamcenter may automatically mark one of the part occurrences as primary, based on an assessment of the maturity of the design occurrence and its latest revision.

You publish links in Multi-Structure Manager, but you can also create and view associations in My Teamcenter.

The parts and designs may be included in a collaboration context, but this is not required.