Change the displayed units of measure

You can change the displayed unit of measure; Teamcenter converts these values for you. Teamcenter distinguishes internally between show mode and edit mode during this activity. You can only change the displayed units of measure in show mode. If you are in edit mode, Teamcenter changes the value you enter.

• Click the hyperlinked measurement unit and select a new unit.

If you are in show mode, Teamcenter immediately converts the unit for display purposes.

If you are in edit mode, Teamcenter assumes you want to change the attribute value. It first internally converts the value you enter to the storage unit, and then converts to the desired unit. If the storage unit is formatted in such a way that this conversion cannot take place (for example, not enough decimal places), Teamcenter cannot continue with this conversion and an error message occurs. If, for example, you are editing the following value, and want to enter the value in m, not mm, you cannot simply change the unit from mm to m as in show mode.

If you attempt to do this, Teamcenter tries to convert 40 meters to the storage unit, which is millimeters. This results in a very large value of 40,000 millimeters. Because the mm storage unit specifies that this unit can only have three decimal places before and after the zero, Teamcenter cannot complete the conversion and displays the following error message: CopyThe entered value 40 m (40000 mm) cannot be formatted with the REAL(3,3) format because there are too many digits before the decimal point. The attribute can have a value of 0 or a range between 0.001 and 999.999 mm. Note: The attribute's storage unit is mm. During conversion, values are first converted to mm. Instead, enter the value with the correct unit. In this case, that is 0.04m. Caution Teamcenter always converts between the metric and nonmetric formats that you specify in the attribute dictionary. If, during conversion, the converted value’s number of digits is larger than the specified target format allows, Teamcenter truncates the excess digits and displays an erroneous value. For example, an attribute has a nonmetric format with REAL(3.5) and a metric format of REAL(4.3). If you try to convert 622 inches to a metric value, the correct converted value is 15,800 millimeters. Teamcenter, however, truncates the converted value to 1580 to fit the defined format (REAL(4.3)).

If a class is set to both (metric and nonmetric), and if any of the attributes do not have a unit definition for both metric and nonmetric, Teamcenter uses the available unit for both unit systems. This behavior supports use cases where certain attributes may not have different metric and nonmetric units, such as time.