Fundamentals > Family Tables > Working with Instances in Family Tables > About Instance Operations
  
About Instance Operations
Instance operations include tasks like verifying, unlocking, renaming, and retrieving instances, creating new instances, and creating and updating instance indexes and accelerator files. You can use File > Manage Session > Update Index or File > Manage File > Instance Accelerator (which opens the Instance Accelerator dialog box) to perform most instance operations. You can also use the Family Table to perform certain instance operations.
Retrieving Instances
When you retrieve an instance from disk, the system first checks to see if an instance accelerator file exists for the instance.
If the instance accelerator file exists, the system retrieves the generic and the accelerator file. If the generic has not changed since the instance was last saved, the system immediately proceeds as if the instance were a separate model. Otherwise, if the generic has changed, the instance is regenerated before displaying it.
If the instance accelerator file does not exist, the system retrieves the generic and regenerates the instance.
Verifying Instances
When you verify an instance, you regenerate the instance. You can use Verify to facilitate the process of bringing newly created instances into session so that they can be added to the instance index file. Saving the generic after verification causes the names of all instances that were successfully regenerated to be added to the instance index file for that directory.
Copying an Instance to the Generic
You can copy the values of an instance to the generic model. However, you must remember that the generic establishes the default configuration (absence or presence of features, members) and dimensions for all instances. Therefore, replacing the values for the generic with the values from an instance may change instances where you used an asterisk to accept default values.
When you copy an instance to the generic, the original generic is deleted. If you want to keep the generic model, create an instance identical to it.
Deleting Instances from a Family Table
To delete an instance, delete the row that contains the instance. If the instance is in memory, Creo Parametric warns you that the instance is no longer table-driven.
After you delete an instance, you cannot undo the deletion. To retrieve the instance without creating it anew, you can erase the model from the current memory and close the window. This works only if you have not saved the model. If you have saved the model, you can retrieve an earlier version in which the instance still exists.