Windchill ESI Assumptions
As mentioned earlier, besides reviewing your business processes and organization’s needs, you also need to review the following assumptions to help you understand howWindchill ESI is designed. Based on this information, you can then decide what configurations to make or if you need to add custom functionality forWindchill ESI to work with your business needs.
• All data validation occurs in Windchill PDMLink to ensure that the required data exists. Data withinWindchill PDMLink is valid within itself. You can add additional data validation in Windchill PDMLink.
• XML schema and data fromWindchill PDMLink is valid.
• All organizations being sent fromWindchill PDMLink are valid organizations in Oracle Applications. If the organization is not valid in Oracle Applications, object export fails and an error is returned to Windchill PDMLink.
• Windchill PDMLink is the system-of-record for items and BOMs that are created or changed in Oracle Applications based on objects published from Windchill PDMLink. In the case of CNs,Windchill PDMLink is the initial master but once the CN is published, the system-of-record control is passed to Oracle Applications.
• Once an object is published to Oracle Applications, attributes mastered or populated byWindchill PDMLink or the EAI components are not modified in Oracle Applications by any component other than Windchill ESI. However, there is no systematic enforcement of security in Oracle Applications for item attributes, or on BOM attributes mastered by Windchill PDMLink. If Windchill-mastered attributes are changed in Oracle, and a subsequent release is made from Windchill, these attributes may be overwritten or the release may fail.
• Windchill PDMLink and the distribution targets use the same versioning scheme (For example, 1234 versus abcd.) for allWindchill ESI objects and versions are always in-sync for published objects.Windchill PDMLink is the system-of-record andWindchill PDMLink controls the versioning.
• Versions are not published out of order from Windchill PDMLink, as described in the following example:
Windchill PDMLink publishes version A to the distribution target.Windchill PDMLink then continues to create versions B and C, but they are never approved to be published.Windchill PDMLink then creates and approves version D to be published. Once version D is approved to be published, the ERP distribution target is sent version D.Windchill PDMLink does not release versions B and C after releasing version D.
• In Oracle Applications, revisions are sorted according to ASCII rules. Each revision must be greater than the previous revision.
• When adding new revisions, the revision date entered must not be earlier than other existing revision dates. New revision numbers must be greater than the revision number of the currently effective revision.
• Multiple revisions can be defined on the same date, since each can be differentiated by time-stamp.
• Objects from Windchill PDMLink are always published either with CNs or are never published with CNs. Any instance of Windchill ESI does not publish objects with CNs as well as without CNs. This is enforced globally by the Windchill ESI EAI software components. Multiple objects are not released with CNs as well as without CNs.
• Standalone documents or documents associated to parts or BOMs will not be published to Oracle Applications because the current out-of-the-box Oracle Applications APIs do not support document attachments or standalone CAD document structures.
• An alternate is an interchangeable "piece" part. A substitute is an interchangeable part on a BOM. Windchill ESI and Oracle Applications support substitute parts, but will not support alternate parts, since Oracle Applications does not share Windchill's concept of alternates. If you need to support alternates, you must add appropriate business logic, data mappings, and API functionality to support the alternate parts.
• The "Alternate Item Group" attribute on part-to-part links in Windchill, which is persisted in Windchill and transferred with components and substitutes to each Windchill ESI distribution target system, is irrelevant to Oracle Applications and can be safely ignored (not mapped) in Windchill ESI for Oracle Applications.
• If Windchill does not supply an effectivity date for a given revised item or BOM header,Windchill ESI provides a suitable default effectivity date for the item and, if applicable, its children.
• Effective dates can either be the current date or a date in the future; Oracle Applications does not support a date in the past.