Soft Typing
• Soft Typing is the name of the set of Windchill capabilities that allows a customer to, at runtime, add additional types and attributes to the out-of-the-box Windchill Schema. This is done without having adding additional tables to the database, without restarting the database, and without restarting the system.
• With the Soft Typing capabilities, customers can add data types and meta data attributes that are meaningful to them and which are necessary for their business processes. For all intents and purposes, these customer-defined types are no different than any other out-of-the-box object in the system: Types can assigned access control rules, can be assigned workflows and lifecycles, can be assigned custom UIs, can have Object Initialization Rules assigned to them, are accessible via APIs, etc.
No user interface modifications are necessary as the Windchill user interfaces automatically accommodate (e.g. adapt to) these additional Types and Attributes.
The general guideline to be followed is this: If a need can be satisfied by soft typing, then it should. That is, do not customize (i.e. create modeled extensions) to the out-of-the-box schema. The reason for this rule is to minimize the total cost of ownership of Windchill and minimize upgrade costs and burdens. This, in no way, is a limitation on the customizability of Windchill; but, rather, the intent of the rule is to reduce the cost of ownership.