About Designating Annotation Elements as Control Characteristics

Annotation elements created in Creo applications contain valuable information such as geometric tolerances, drawing notes, dimensions, surface finishing notes, and welding symbols. This information is particularly useful in the planning of downstream manufacturing processes. Therefore, you can designate annotation elements as control characteristics.

Control characteristics, like model items, capture and communicate the design intent and critical product information required by manufacturing. Not only can you use these control characteristics to find and reuse model data, the control characteristics are also useful in the planning stage. You can access information for the manufacturing decisions without having to open the models in the Creo application or other CAD systems to verify the model data. After you check in the models with the annotation elements designated as control characteristics to Windchill, MPMLink in Windchill accesses the designated annotation elements. Therefore, you can designate annotation elements as control characteristics according to manufacturing and machining requirements.

You can click Annotate >

Annotation Feature or right-click an annotation element on the Model Tree and click Edit Definition and use the Annotation Feature dialog box to designate annotation elements as control characteristics. To designate an annotation element as a control characteristic, you must select an annotation element in the Element Name column and select the Designate and Control Characteristic check boxes on the Annotation Feature dialog box. You can click Columns on the Annotation Feature dialog box to open the Annotation Columns dialog box and select the Designate and the Control Characteristics column names and add them as columns next to the Element Name column in the Annotation Feature dialog box. You can change the designation state of the annotation elements based on the information displayed by the Designate and Control Characteristics columns.

After you designate an annotation element in the Designate dialog box, you can select the designated annotation element in the Object Name list and select the adjacent check box in the Control Characteristics column.

When you designate annotation elements as control characteristics, you can set the designate_model_item_params configuration option to yes to automatically designate all the associated parameters, including the user-defined parameters, with their units and names, and store the designated parameters as IBAs on the server. You can click Tools > Parameters and undesignate some of the parameters in the Parameters dialog box.

If you add a parameter to a designated model object or annotation element, you must also designate the newly added parameter to view the parameter as a new attribute in Windchill.

When you check in the models to the server, the CAD Documents and the corresponding WTParts list the designated annotation elements. While you can search features by their IDs, you can search and retrieve annotation elements by their IDs and names, including unique user-defined names. Like model items, control characteristics are associated with the CAD Documents and WTParts checked in to the server. You cannot independently check out the designated annotation elements, edit them, and check them in.