Link drawing note to part/assy description

[rossob]

I am wondering how to link a note in a drawing template to the description entered in a part/assembly file level so it populates automatically when the drawing is created.

The field I am using for this description in part/assembly files is the DB_PART_DESC field, which is what parts lists refer to for the description field.

Most of the information I am using on a drawing sheet are attributes that are entered inside the drawing file. Because this description already exists inside the part/assembly file I would like for the drawing to inherit this description for the model placed in the drawing, so it doesn't need to be entered again.

Ross

NX5.0.2.2 WinXP SP2
SolidWorks 2007

 

[hudson888]

Ross,

The short answer is I don't think so. The DB_PART_NAME attribute that comes from the part that you are drawing can certainly be accessed using a parts list. The best I can do is to tell you what I know won't work. If there are new features I don't know in NX-5 then I'm happy to stand corrected, in which case there would be some solution that neither of us has thought of. For now I can only say that the technique you referred to seems to have a logical flaw.

The drawing is not inherently guaranteed to have only one part loaded into it hence the difficulty in what you are trying to do. The attribute itself is certainly accessible as an object attribute of the component that is the subject of your drawing. To understand this better try adding annotations with relationships using the text editor in drafting. An object based attribute used in the text editor creates a note in the form of <W!12345@ATTRIBUTE> where 12345 is the object number of the component in this example. Unfortunately in a template situation you can't be sure that the component that you're adding will have the same object number on all occasions.

we experimented recently for somebody trying to add the drawing file name to the face of the drawing in NX-2. That functionality is actually supported in NX-5 and you can reference PLMS standard drawing templates to find out more about it. In that case we more or less developed a journal file to do it or maybe you could use a macro. You need to select the component somewhere in the process in order to establish the object number, we managed to then replace an pre-defined attribute with the text result in a non-associative manner. I don't even know whether you'll be able to do better in NX-5.

A possible work around that occurs to me is that most people call the drawing a similar number to the part that is drawn you may therefore be able to find some attributes that you can already use. Otherwise leave it as an attribute but consider that you can at least cut and paste values to do most of the editing so it will not usually be a massive issue if you have to edit it manually.

Best Regards

Hudson