Annotation Settings Migration

• Motivation
• The Recommended Way
• Brute Force Method
• Useful Tips
• Mapping Table: Old -> New
• Examples

Motivation

Starting with CoCreate OneSpace Modeling 2007 default settings of Annotation are presented to the user by means of the Default Settings Browser which can be accessed from the Edit -> Settings menu.

We strongly recommend to migrate any old Annotation customizations (in respect to default settings) to the new Default Settings Browser concept. This document should help you to do this as smooth as possible.

The Recommended Way

Please follow the following steps to migrate your Annotation default settings:

1. Start Creo Elements/Direct Modeling without any customizations.
   Make sure that neither SDSITECUSTOMIZEDIR nor SDCORPCUSTOMIZEDIR is set and that your personal customization directory is empty.

2. Read your old Annotation customization files (am_customize ...) line by line and ...

3. Lookup each old setting in the Mapping Table at the end of this document to determine the new settings path in the Default Settings Browser.

4. Open the corresponding setting in the Default Settings Browser

5. Modify the currently displayed value and enter the value as given in your old customization file

6. Comment out each command or function call in your old customization file which you just migrated to the Default Settings Browser

7. Continue these steps for all default setting calls in your old Annotation customization files

8. When done, exit Creo Elements/Direct Modeling and Annotation

After these steps, one or more files are written to the subdirectory Annotation/Default_Settings within your personal customization directory.

Follow these steps to finish the Annotation default settings migration:

1. Copy the files which were created as result of the above procedure to your site or corp customization directory.

2. Reenable your site and/or corp customization directories

3. Make sure that the above modified (in step 6.) old customization files will be used in your startup sequence and not any other unmodified files.

4. Start Creo Elements/Direct Modeling and Annotation and open the Default Settings Browser

5. Verify that the default settings displayed in the browser are the ones which you entered in the previous session. Especially check that no setting has an asterisk character (*) displayed in the source column. For more details on this, see below. In addition the source column should show 'site' or 'corp' depending to which directory the files have been copied to.

6. To finally cross check that all settings have been migrated successfully, create a drawing with a few views and annotate these views to see if all default settings are applied as in the previous release.

Brute Force Method

NOTE: This is not the recommended way to migrate your old Annotation default settings, although it is the simplest way:

Don't do anything and run CoCreate OneSpace Designer 2007 Annotation with the old Annotation customization files.

You'll see that all your Annotation default settings will be applied to the new version as well.

But, this approach has a few drawbacks:

1. One or more Compatibility styles are created at the root node Annotation

2. Potentially a lot more compatibility reference styles are created especially if you load an old dimension style file via am_load_dim_table with settings which vary from the pre 15.0 defaults.

3. Any modification of default settings at runtime whose values are defined through an old customization file are not persistent. The value specified in the old customization file will always overwrite the value which you used in your last session.

4. You can't take advantage of the new standard styles ASME, DIN, ISO and JIS which we deliver with CoCreate OneSpace 2007.

To detect settings whose values are defined through an old customization file, an asterisk character (*) is displayed in the source column to the right of the source string.

We strongly recommend that you review all these settings to see where the current value came from to be able to remove the code and to replace the code with the proper modification in the Default Settings Browser. The functions listed in the Mapping Table will be removed with one of the next major versions.

Useful Tips

Asterisk in Source Column

To detect settings whose values are defined through an old customization function, an asterisk character (*) is displayed in the source column to the right of the source string.

Warning in Console Window

If you use old functionality in old customization files or written functions to set Annotation default settings, a warning is issued in the Console Window. To see these warnings, start Creo Elements/Direct Modeling and open the Console window (View -> Console) before you start Annotation.

In case you have old function/command calls in use, you'll see something like this:

"The obsolete function [AM_TEXT_SETTINGS] was called. Adapt functionality and use Settings Browser with path [Annotation/Text]."

If you started Creo Elements/Direct Modeling in verbose mode (-v command line option) you'll even see from which customization file this old function/command call came from. This makes it easy for you to locate old function/command calls and how to replace these with the proper setting modification (path displayed in Console) in the Default Settings Browser.

Document Settings

In Annotation, the command Edit -> Settings -> "Default Settings -> HTML" is quite useful to see all available default settings, their localized names together with the unique path name, the value type, the current value and source. Use this HTML output to search for specific settings or to communicate with PTC Support in case of issues.

Mapping Table: Old -> New

The table below shows you which commands and functions (and their parameters) have been replaced with default settings now accessible from the Default Settings Browser.

Some hints:

• [UPPERCASE] names indicate commands (dialogs, action routines)
• [lowercase] names indicate LISP functions
• config-view-labels, config-section, config-detail used to work with user units
• Further information about a specific command/function can be found in the Annotation online help Annotation customization for advanced users

Areas:

• Drawing
• View
• Process3D
• Dimension
• Text
• Symbol
• Sketch
• BOM
• Geometry
• Auxiliary Geometry
• Hatch
• Plot
• View Port
• Other

Examples

• Single value:

    (sd-set-setting-value "Annotation/Refline/SourceGap" :value 0.0)
  

• Multiple values:

    (sd-set-setting-values
      :application "Annotation"
      :level :user
      :values (list "Refline/SourceGap" 1.2 
                    "Refline/DestinationGap" 1.7))
  
    (sd-update-current-setting-values)
  

• Reference style:

    (sd-set-setting-values
      :application "Annotation"
      :level :user
      :style-path "Annotation/General/LineStyle"
      :style :ref_line_my_style 
      :values (list "Ltype" :dotted "Color" 15717216 "Pensize" 0.6 "PenScaled" t))
  
    (sd-set-setting-value "Annotation/Refline/LineStyle" :value :ref_line_my_style)