Assembly Structure update

[NXsupport]

Hi All,

General NX question.. How do you justify ,why we should do Assembly Structure update regularly on assemblies..

Iam trying to write a document of best practices for user community at the site..

We have Teamcenter and NX here.. Tceng 2005SR1 MP6 and NX 4.0.4.2

Any suggestions to this will be greatly appreciated

Thanks in Advance

 

[hudson888]

Teamcenter has a range of its own foibles with assemblies and how they relate to the database via the PSE depending on whether you use workflow or not. Too numerous to answer...

However regardless of whether you're using Teamcenter or native you'll find that assemblies with branches of more than three levels deep can require some maintenance for optimal performance.

I've never heard a really spot on explanation for this but what roughly occurs is that unless you're able to fully load assemblies the contents of lower levels may not have refreshed from the previously saved session. Many users of very large master assemblies will be familiar with NOT loading all components by default simply because the assemblies are so large that it takes too much time and processor power to operate that way. With badly out of date assembly structures the problem that they confront under those circumstances is that having opened a large assembly with no components loaded they browse the ANT to find a particular component listed but when they attempt to load it they find that it is no longer there. The structure is out of date.

What you need to do before you save or release assemblies is to load up the structure and save each assembly. I advise building master assemblies in modular fashion and updating them by opening them with your load option defaults set Structure Only and using the Tool>Assembly Navigator>Update Structure function. Set your load options correctly first and it generally shouldn't take too long. If you find your assemblies so large as to cause you grief then maybe just update the upper levels.

I am critical of the apparent condition that it seems that if your lower levels are up to date but your upper levels are not that when you go into the top of your assembly and only update a few levels down that it doesn't inherit the correct information from the lower levels until they are top down interrogated. It might be more useful for people with huge assemblies or scant resources if you could go down just the one or two levels and garner the changes from the lower branches without having to interrogate the whole assembly. I thought it was supposed to work that way but I can't see it happening as such whenever I have tried.

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[SiW979]

We use massive assemblies here and the majority of them are out of date due to people not understanding why it is important to maintain the integrity of the structure. I recently posted a thread asking other people to share their experiences of how they use update structure, especially where large assemblies are concerned.

We are piloting some processes where the update structure is done automatically every night at midnight on the top level of some very large assemblies with varying degress of success.

If you do not keep your structures up to date, and like us you open assemblies with no components loaded and then a lot of NX's assembly functionality such as true shape proximity filtering becomes useless as this relies on the structure of being up to date in order to return accurate results when searching for components.

My advise would be to keep your structures as up to date as possible and even look towards getting them to update automatically every night and therefore taking the responsibilty of the CAD users.

Best regards

Simon (NX4.0.4.2 MP9 - TCEng 9.1.3.6.c)

http://www.jcb.com

Life shouldn't be measured by the number of breaths you take, but by the number of times when it's taken away...