Filtering Part Structures
Part structures can be large and complex, and may include thousands of parts in assembly hierarchies that are six to ten levels deep. They can represent only one product, or a family of similar products made up of optional modules. Part structures also capture the configuration history of a product as it changes over time. Thousands of configurations can be designed, manufactured, and sold during the lifetime of a product. Windchill provides filtering tools that reduce the complexity of a part structure by showing product configurations that are valid for a point in time or for a specific product serial number. Other types of filters are used to show a subset of the part structure that is useful for a specific product development task.
Part structure filters are divided into three categories:
• Configuration specification—Filters the part structure to show a complete bill of material or configuration, that has been produced in the past or is planned for the future. Each node of the part structure shows one part version that matches the configuration specification criteria.
• Options filter—Modular part structures are made up of configurable parts that represent customer choices for modular functionality. An optional product structure is called overloaded because it contains all components for all options, even when the options are mutually exclusive. Option filters reduce the overloaded part structure to show the standard parts for the selected options.
• Specialized filters—Specialized filters display a subset of a part structure that is relevant to a specific task.
An attribute filter is used to display only parts that have specific attribute values. For more information, see
About Attribute Filters.
A spatial filter displays parts based on geometric criteria. For example, a designer might want to only see parts within a specified sphere or box volume, or close to a selected part. For more information, see
About Spatial Filters.
The filter types can be combined to solve complex filtering problems. For example, you can construct a filter to display the latest design baseline (configuration specification) for electrical system components (specialized attribute filter) on the 6 cylinder engine (option filter).