Every (supported) class is documented as part of JavaDoc, and every (supported) GenAs-annotated class includes the GenAs annotation in its JavaDoc. This means that Windchill’s schema is entirely documented in JavaDoc and is available for reference when modeling your own class. Furthermore, the annotations themselves are included in JavaDoc (and reside in the com.ptc.windchill.annotations.metadata package). Information about, and example usages of annotations are readily available in JavaDoc.

JavaDoc is particularly useful for understanding how to model and for mining Windchill’s model for examples. However, it can be difficult to determine the associations a particular class participates in from the JavaDoc alone, as the role members typically don’t include references to their associations in their own JavaDoc. Information about the associations a given object participates is available via Windchill introspection and can be accessed via two utilities.

The first utility is InfoReport. When run against a specified class in a Windchill shell, InfoReport will generate everything that is known about the class, including properties, database info, descendants, and, especially, associations.

The second utility is included as part of the Windchill user interface, but is not enabled by default. The client, when enabled, provides a navigable interface for browsing introspection information.

To enable it: