Export pdf&dxf&stp from Creo drawing/windchill

[dejan95]

Hello,

do maybe any of you have any tips on how to quickly export pdf&dxf&stp from windchill or from a drawing?

We store all the parts in the same drawing under the different sheets. When we need to manufacture this parts we need to create pdf&dxf&stp, which takes a lot of time because we need to open each sheet separately to use a mapkeys to create this files.

is there a easier solution?

BTW we use Creo 4.0.
Thaanks!

Best regards!

 

[3DDave]

If your system administrator is capable, I believe they can set up Publish tasks in Windchill to do all of that.

From within Creo it will take whatever time it takes to do the processing. Depending on the number of sheets, you could create individual mapkeys to do however many drawing sheets there are - mapkeys just replay the same steps a user makes. One mapkey could do 2 sheets, another could do 3, and so on to 50 or 100 sheets, depending on how excited you are for it.

Note that since mapkeys can use other mapkeys one could have makpey for 100 sheets just run the mapkey for 99 sheets and then add the final piece. I don't know how deeply this can go, but it can still shorten the mapkeys considerably.

Alternative: You can use VBA from Excel or Word to use the "sendkeys" command and act as if a user is typing. I recommend using this along with some mapkeys as Creo doesn't have much feedback available; with VBA you can provide Excel a list of files and it can check the output directory to see if the files are created yet before moving on. Or you can use VBA to create a trail file to run so that no checking is required - probably the most annoying way as Creo doesn't work well if there is a glitch in the trail file. Changing the suffix to .txa will cause it to be interpreted as a training file and Creo will simply stop if there is an error.

 

[dejan95]

@3DDave thank you for your insight. I will look into it!