CATIA Drawing Templates

[NirVidP]

While generating drawings in CATIA, which of the method do you use?

1. Default CATIA macros (In the new drawing Edit > Sheet Background and then Insert > Drawing > Frame & Title Block
2. Custom macros
3. Template drawing (File > New From > <Select existing drawing template>)
4. Other than any of the above

 

[MarkAF]

The current method my company uses is 3 - a set of template files. The method to use macros would be more robust in case you needed to change borders or sheet sizes, but that requires many macros to be maintained.
In our environment, we do work for several customers that is deliverable on their drawing borders, so we have a need for many different templates. For me it seems much easier to take a template file from our customer and configure it than it is to make a set of macros to generate the template to replicate the customer given format.
We also use a PDM system that automates much of the entry on the title blocks. The system communicates with parameters in the drawing file, and text boxes on the sheet are linked to the parameters. We typically load out the sheet template from PDM to the user's session, add our views to the sheet, and store the file back to the PDM system as a new drawing.
Beyond that we do have some macros to handle multi-sheet numbering (sheet 1 of 3, for example) and to handle BOMs in the format we like.

 

[NirVidP]

Thank you MarkAF for the detailed response. very useful information.

 

[weagan22]

We have a completely separate macro that creates the drawing form, but it adds parameters to the drawing that fill all the values. That way if someone edits the form manually the actual values are still held in the parameters and the form can quickly be redrawn.

 

[NirVidP]

Thank you weagan22 for the info.
How do you find out if the values are edited? Isn't there a way to 'lock' the values in title box?

 

[weagan22]

The entire form is in the drawing background and every feature is set to no pick mode. This makes it difficult for all but the most experienced user to falsely edit it. Also, all of the paremeters that define the values in the title block are hidden.