Drawing-Part Relationships
While drawings of CAD models do not participate in product structures, they contain important product information. Drawings derived from CAD models have reference links to their models. Drawings can be related to Windchill parts using explicit Content associations, or implicitly by means of a Calculated association created when a drawing’s model is associated to a Windchill part.
The following sections describe options for controlling drawing to part relationships.
Creating Links Between Drawings and Parts
Windchill is capable of locating all drawings referenced by a model and automatically relating them to the part of the model. This association is labeled as Calculated and is automatically created upon initial upload to Windchill. The Calculated association is not a modeled “link” in the database, but is an included association type when CAD documents are collected for actions.
In some cases, you may want to distinguish, say, manufacturing drawings from conceptual drawings by using a modeled link in the database, rather than using the Calculated relationship. The site preference > > controls whether the Auto Associate action creates a Content link in the database. The default is "No".
Auto-relating Drawings to the Model’s Part
A drawing derived from CAD models can be automatically associated with a Content association to its model’s related part. The site preference > > controls which set of models (based on association type) automatically relate their drawings. The preference affects the drawings related by system calculated associations, as well as the user actions: Auto Associate and Edit Associations. The default value is "Owner Only". Possible values are as follows.
• Owner Only—Only drawings of CAD documents with owner association are automatically related to the Part.
• Owner and Images—Drawings of CAD Documents which contribute to Part structure (Owner, Contributing Image and Image) will automatically be related to their Parts.
• All Contributing Models—Any model that contributes information to the Part will also have its drawing automatically related (i.e. models with Owner, Contributing Image, Image, Contributing Content and Custom).
• All Models—All models that are related to a Part will also have their drawings automatically related to the same Part (i.e. models with Owner, Contributing Image, Image, Contributing Content, Custom, and Content associations).
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When the user initially selects only a drawing, then Auto Associate will no longer propose to create and associate the drawing's model.
• If the drawing's model is not associated to any Windchill part, and the user selects ONLY the drawing, then the Auto Associate page no longer proposes to auto associate the drawing; but instead shows it at the root level. (This is new behavior for Windchill 10.2 M020 and later releases.)
• When the drawing's model is not associated to any Windchill part, and the user initially selects BOTH drawing and model, then the Auto Associate page does propose to auto associate the drawing to the new or existing Windchill part identified for the drawing's model.
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Prioritizing Drawing Associations
If the display of Calculated associations is enabled, then by default, when a part is related to two different versions of a CAD document drawing—one with a Content association and one with a Calculated association—then the part information page Related Objects tab shows that it is related to both drawing versions. For example, if part version A.1 was related to CAD document version A.1 with a content association, and then user revises ONLY the CAD document drawing to version B.1, the default behavior is for the Related Objects tab for Part A.1 to show the following.
• Drawing A.1 with a Content association
• Drawing B.1 with a Calculated association
The site preference > > when set to “Yes,” allows you to prioritize Content linkage so that the Calculated type association is not shown. With the preference set, the Related Objects tab for part A.1 shows:
• Drawing A.1 with a Content association
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This preference applies not only to display of Related Objects, but also to the collection process during data management actions. This prioritization of the Content link applies even if the Content-related drawing is an older version than the drawing whose association is Calculated. If there is no Content-associated drawing, the Calculated drawing relationship displays.
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Consider the following use case.
Part A has related objects Model A (Owner association) and Drawing A (Calculated association), shown as follows (For simplicity, iterations are not shown).
• Part A
◦ Model A (Owner)
◦ Drawing A (Calculated)
Then, the user revises the part and drawing to B, but not the model. Default behavior results in the following relationships.
• For Part B
◦ Model A (Owner)
◦ Drawing B (Calculated)
• For Part A
◦ Model A (Owner)
◦ Drawing B (Calculated)
In order to preserve the historical relationships for part A, you can create a content association between Drawing A and Part A. As a result, with the preference set, you see the following.
• For Part B
◦ Model A (Owner)
◦ Drawing B (Calculated)
• For Part A
◦ Model A (Owner)
◦ Drawing A (Content)
Specifying Latest Drawings for Latest Configurations
The site preference > > > when set to “Yes” excludes the collection of any non-latest drawing versions that are found to be compatible for a given CAD model version, whenInclude Related Drawings is part of collection and the Latest configuration is specified. Otherwise, when set to “No” (default value), non-latest compatible drawings will be collected, even for Latest configuration