drawings - one click open

I've thought about this before and can't figure out why a part knows nothing of the assembly or drawing it's in; likewise the relation between assembly and drawing. Whereas, if you open the drawing, it knows what it depends on. I think the problem is that the relationship type is not simply SOME relationship, but dependency. The assembly depends on the models, not vice versa. Delete the assembly and the "components" turn, magically, into parts which do not depend for their existence on assemblies (or drawings). When you get this directionality (and the complexity of the bookkeeping behind keeping track of every assembly a screw was used in ~ and doing this within the screw), you see how unwieldy bidirectionality would be. Part size could grow enormously, just to maintain this type of relational data. Fortunately, Intralink/Oracle keep track of all these relations when Intralink comes into play. Even with Intralink, I know of nothing to tell you to open this drawing when this part is open. You can do an Intralink "Where Used" report on a part that gives you the drawing/assembly where it is used. But there is no such 'where used' functionality within Pro/e. And nothing as simple as opening the drawing the doing another open and finding the part highlighted to Open next. That kind of 'intuitiveness' is exceptional in Pro/e. Don't take it too seriously, don't get enamored with it, you won't encounter it that often. It will not be lurking around every corner to happily surprise you.

David Janes

"Ziomall" wrote in message news:ejrmke$khp$1

@nemesis.news.tpi.pl...

I use Intralink 3.4 and fortunately I have this same name for parts and drawings. But I am little lazy to write down drawing number to open it and I've thought that is possible to make some mapkey for this action. Thanks for your explanation.

Ziomall

I don't think mapkey scripting is intelligent enough to do something like this. I know that in Solidworks the scripting language (VB) would allow you to extract the part name and open the drawing of the same name, but this is because it has access to the API. Even though I have no experience using J-Link, I would venture that ProE's java API could do something similar.

Ziomall wrote:

I was able to achieve this using mapkeys that called external visual basic and microsoft scripts. The goal is to create a trail file that retrieves the drawing. The basic steps are to create mapkeys that:

1) Saves the model tree to disk. 2) Calls a VB script that strips everything but the file name. 3) Runs OS scripts that puts the file name in a generic trail file. 4) Runs the trail file to open the drawing.

This only works if the drawing has the same name as the model. If your model name has letters in it, you need to add a visual basic script that de-capitalizes the letters. It took a while, and there might be an easier way but it works.

Newton