How to Open Solid Edge V19 Assembly in Unigraphics NX5?

[badpeanut]

We use Unigraphics NX5, but received a number of Solid Edge V19 parts and assemblies. We can open the parts without difficulty. When we try to open the Solid Edge assembly files we get two error messages stating "The PLM XML document failed to load" and "Failed to import data from multi-CAD part file" which cause the overall open to fail. We did not receive any *.plmxml files, but we did receive *.cfg files.

How does one open a Solid Edge V19 Assembly in Unigraphics NX5?

 

[hudson888]

A couple of interesting points here. I'm only really aware of .plmxml files via their connection with vis-view, or JT2GO products. This may allude to some smarts in the configuration of things that you can tweak in some way. That may be better than the method I can describe that we used in the past.

Have you worked with your solid edge data using earlier versions of NX?
There was supposed to be some level of interoperability between the two, but my experience was that we didn't find they co-existed comfortably.

At that stage the decision had already been taken at the higher level to change over to NX, and in that context what we found was that the assembly loading directory paths for Solid edge were not being made known to NX when the files were being opened and this caused us no end of hassles. So in order to get the data over to NX once and for all we rounded up all the Solid edge files into a single flat directory structure. The assemblies had a different extension so they stood out. We then opened these setting the NX load options for "From Directory", or "From Folder" in NX-5. That should make the model assemblies open up correctly.

I observed the Solid Edge was placing files in sub-directories per each assembly, which UG wasn't necessarily coping with. It could have been any number of reasons but I suspect they were all to do with the way Solid Edge being used and/or configured in the past. If somebody knows how it ought to be configured to work better than this then fine. Please let us know.

Now at the time we were using NX-2 and NX-3 so the following may not concern you, but we had a lot of trouble with sessions falling over trying to open some of the Solid edge files, even after they had been saved using UG-NX. It seemed that the solution was to get rid of the Solid edge parametric features. Once we did so the files behaved and things were more stable. Since in the main we had no intention of reverting to Solid Edge I took the top assembly and ran it through step214, then back into NX-3. The result was a clean assembly with no parameters, and all the right file names. In our case this wasn't a big deal since the nature of the designs were large rectangular slabs with holes for fasteners and the odd chamfer for welding, in other words very easy geometry. We therefore had no worries about maintaining the geometry, and for the most part few concerns with maintaining the drawings either.

Now admittedly the last part of what I had to say isn't for everybody, and you just have my word that it was a managed process where these decisions weren't taken lightly. For those who may carp against removing the parameters please understand that I already agree that you wouldn't do this in all cases. The main point is to let you know that we also had problems and we applied these solutions in part because they were appropriate to the circumstances.

Best Regards

Hudson