Check In / Check out Teamcenter

[CPaul]

Hi guys,
I have a question about checking in and out in Teamcenter. I have been explicitly checking my parts/drawings out and I'm wondering what exactly it means. Does checking a part out simply mean that others cannot modify it or does it actually copy the files to your local? We used to use Ideas and checking out a file locks the files from others modifying it, as well as copying the parts temporarily to your computer so you can work off them.
The reason I'm asking this is because I'm having to wait 20/30 minutes for my drawing to update in Teamcenter. Am I working off the network so it might be a question of our network speed? Is it a function of my computer's speed?'

Thanks in advance,
Chris
NX 7.5, Teamcenter Express 5.3

 

[JerryLynch]

Chris,

We use NX7 and TCe 2007.1.8.3 so it might be a little different for you but in my experience check in/check out allows you, the owner, to edit the name and some of the other properties in the dataset or Item.

The way TeamCenter deals with who can edit datasets is through ownership. You can transfer ownership to someone or request it yourself but that is the only way to gain permission to edit a model (dataset).

You should be able to "force" an update to your TeamCenter information ahead of the normal scheduled network refresh. This can be done by clicking the "Refresh" icon on your toolbar (second icon from the left under Edit) or View->Refresh (F5).

The above method has worked for myself and several others here at my company so that might be your best bet.

Though you didn't directly ask for it, we are seeing that, for load times, our network speed rather than processor or graphics performance may be the limiting factor but we are still conducting tests to confirm.

Hope some of this helps, sorry for bouncing around,

Jerry

 

[CPaul]

Thanks Jerry, ya our network is definitely slow at work and might be a big cause of this.
When I say update a drawing, I'm referring to changing the model (such as suppressing a part in the assembly) then updating my drawing so the views reflect the change. This takes me 20/30 minutes, although the assembly is very large and the drawing contains ~25 views in it.

 

[JerryLynch]

Is it 20-30 min of the status bar scrolling across NX telling you it's updating the views or are you just waiting around and checking it once in a while?

 

[CPaul]

20-30 minutes of the status bar, and hour glass cursor.

 

[JerryLynch]

OK, my guess is that it's the network. I don't know of any way (settings ect.) to speed it up outside of upgrading network speed or bringing your servers closer.

Sorry,

Jerry

 

[CPaul]

So Jerry, when working in teamcenter, it will be much slower, than natively, because you are bottle necked by your network speed when using teamcenter?

 

[IanxXx]

Not quite on topic but teamcenter can also allow access to data owned by someone else through the use of access control list (acl's) this allows you to add users and enable them write access

 

[JerryLynch]

Loading, saving, and update speeds would be effected. Depending on how NX handles information from a server (as opposed to off your hard drive) all of your processes may be slower through TeamCenter. IT at my company is currently looking into this, I'll update when I have more information.

 

[looslib]

Once the model and drawing are loaded in memory, any updates caused by supressing a part are done local. There should be no interaction with TC at that point.

What is you computer OS and NX version/MP?
How much memory on your computer?



"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[CPaul]

Ben,
So as soon as I open the part in teamcenter it is stored locally? That's essentially what I meant to ask (might not have been clear enough).

OS is XP Pro (Dual Core 3.25 gigs of RAM).
NX is 7.5.0.32.
Maximum memory allocated is 367 MB, is that an issue?

 

[looslib]

Yes, NX (and other CAD systems) are very memory intensive. With only that much memory, it sounds like you are doing memory swapping with the pagefile.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[CPaul]

Ben, hopefully this is the issue, that would be awesome. How much memory do you recommend allocating?

 

[CPaul]

Nevermind, I was thinking that was a limit, but it looks like it just reports how much memory NX has used in the session?
Looks like a call to GTAC is in order

 

[tnguyenssp]

Anyone here know how to load the part file to the Chrysler Team Center. Actually all I need to use Chrysler Team Center to do the CheckMate to Chrysler specific. Do I need to load the part to the team center and how am I working to do it.

 

[JurgenKreisel]

Paul,
I am a former I-Deas user as well.
We are using NX7.5 along with TCUA 8.3.
How I understand TC works is that when you get an assembly/part from TC it actually loads the parts in a cache folder on your local computer.

We have our check out policy set to automatic so as soon as someone makes a change to a part/assembly it will check it out.
All this does (just like I-Deas) is put a lock on the item in TC so no one else can check it out. As soon as the save has completed then the check out lock is removed.

For your update times I would say it is not a TC issue since all the updating is done locally.
Once we upgraded our workstations to Win7 64bit with 8-12GB of ram we saw a dramatic performance improvement.
The only time you will access TC is when you hit the save button.
That is when network speed will come into play along with your computer.

 

[CPaul]

Thanks Jurgen,
That was the answer that I was looking for initially. Looks like Teamcenter cant really be the cause of the slow load times.

Seems like this is already a big issue:

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=316259

Guess its just something we'll have to deal with for awhile.

 

[JurgenKreisel]

Paul,

One more thing that we do here is that we run ugmanager.
What this means is that we have a script that launches UG and connects that session to TC. About the only thing you cannot do from the TC navigator from within UG is rename parts and run workflows. To do that you will need to launch TC.

You can launch TC first and then launch UG from within TC, but after our experience with TC and I-Deas several years ago we would rather not have TC visually running.

This work really well for us since 99.9% of all our TC use is thru UG. We only use TC as a CAD manager similar to I-Deas TDM. I am the only one that uses workflows to lock down customer data.