CadActive^®

We’ve been quietly at work over the last two months building out template automation for SettingSync. While we’re still at work creating this functionality, we thought it would be helpful to explain what we’re building and why it’s important for Creo users. 

What is a Model Template?

Before we talk about the automation we’re creating, we should talk about what CAD templates are and why they are important. Typically, when an organization’s designers/engineers begin a new Part (PRT), Assembly (ASM), or Drawing (DRW), they create it using a template defined and controlled by the organization. This start template contains certain model features (usually an X, Y, and Z plane and coordinate system) and other information, such as view details, metadata, and annotations. 

Template attributes can be grouped into three main categories:

• View Details
  • • Combined States
    • Orientations
    • Simplified Reps
    • Layer States
    • Layers
• Metadata
  • • Parameters
    • Relations
• Annotations
  • Notes
  • Symbols
  • Dimensions

Why are Templates Important?

By having a standard template, each PRT, ASM, and DRW created by an organization contains standard design information that can be flowed into PDM/PLM data management systems or downstream for manufacturing. 

But what happens when organizations use imported vendor models, old/legacy models, and other models that are non-compliant with their standard start templates?

Oftentimes, organizations spend hundreds of hours per year getting non-compliant models to be compliant by manually adding missing attributes. This is non value-added time and needs to be done to ensure the right information is contained in models. 

What is Template Automation?

The template automation we’re building in SettingSync will help an organization define their template attributes and store them in a database. Users will be able to take a “compliant” template and upload the attribute information to the database. PRTs, ASMs, and DRWs will have different attributes and therefore different templates; users can easily configure the database to pull certain “global” attributes into different templates. 

For example, an organization will likely have different parameters they want to apply to a PRT compared to an ASM. They would create two different parameter profiles, which are unique groups of global parameters with specific values, for the PRT and ASM. In the below picture, they apply the PRT parameter profile to the PRT template.

Once the database has a template with the needed attributes, users can switch back to Creo and validate template compliance by checking the Creo model data against the “standardized” data in the database.If a model is determined to be non-compliant and missing information, users can automatically generate the missing attributes.

Using the Parameter Profile from above, we notice our example PRT is non-compliant and is missing a SYSTEM_LOCATOR parameter (shown with a red status symbol). By checking the box and selecting OK, it will add the SYSTEM_LOCATOR parameter to the model.

This product is still being developed, but we will soon have this template automation functionality for all model attributes. This will save users and organizations time and money, along with allowing for easier data flow downstream.