Searching for appearances

You can search large products by spatial and attribute criteria and display the results in the navigation tree and the viewer. You can search a configuration of an end item for which an appearance set is already defined. (An appearance set is a collection of objects that defines the usage of every part included in an end item.) Your Teamcenter administrator defines appearance sets, but typically only for a few end items that represent large assemblies to allow fast searches.

When you search BOM lines on a large product, you can restrict the search to a specific spatial region. For example, you may want to find all parts that are located within two centimeters of part X. To allow spatial searches, Teamcenter maintains spatial data in addition to the appearance set. Maintaining spatial data is optional and you can create appearance sets without spatial information).

You can only search if an appearance set exists that matches the active BOM. An appearance set matches the current BOM if the following are true:

• Your Teamcenter administrator has created the necessary appearance sets.

• The end item of the appearance set corresponds to the top (root) line of the BOM.

• The view of the appearance set is the same as the current BOM window.

• The revision rule (for example, Pending) of the appearance set corresponds to the revision rule of the current BOM window (for example, Pending as of 1-Jan-200X).