Association Types for CAD-Driven Product Design
Driving the creation of a Windchill product structure from its underlying CAD relationships has been a fundamental capability of Windchill Workgroup Manager from the beginning. However, this capability was limited. Only the association types listed in the following table were initially available to control the build rules for the creation of a Windchill product structure.
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Initial Association Type
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Build Rule Characteristics
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Change in Windchill 9.0
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Active
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• Creates a companion Windchill product structure.
• Allows attribute information to be passed between the CAD structure and the associated Windchill product structure.
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Association type renamed to Owner.
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Passive
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• Contributes to the description of the Windchill product structure.
• Similar to the behavior of a Describes link between a Windchill document and a Windchill part.
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Association type renamed to Content
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Beginning with Windchill 9.1, and to provide greater flexibility, the characteristics of the Owner association were decomposed to three basic building blocks, or build link types.
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Owner Association Build Link Type
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Build Rule Characteristic
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Special Build Rule Adherence
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|---|---|---|
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Structure
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Creates a companion Windchill product structure.
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Only one CAD document can drive the Windchill product structure.
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Attribute
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Allows attribute information to be passed between the CAD structure and the associated Windchill product structure.
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Many CAD documents can drive the attributes of the Windchill product structure.
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Representation
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When the CAD document is added to a CAD structure, add its associated Windchill part to the generated Windchill product structure.
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• A CAD document can only represent one Windchill part.
• A Windchill part can have many CAD documents representing it.
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It is important to distinguish between the use of the term ‘representation’ when referring to build links (that is, represented in, or participating in, a structure), and the use of the term ‘representation’ when referring to a Windchill Visualization Services (WVS) representation of a part (for example, as seen in the Representations/Annotations table on a Windchill part information page.
For more information about WVS representations, see the section, Representations of CAD Documents with Owner-Associated Parts.
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