Losing work from SmarTeam

[Qluq]

Hi everyone,

I am having some troubles with SmarTeam and I hope that someone here has a solution for me. At my company we use SmarTeam with Catia v5. I will first state my confusion with some SmarTeam behaviours and the problems it has given us, and then a small description of how we have set up the models' parent / child dependencies.

The first and biggest problem is that I have been working on an assembly after checking it out, and upon completing the work, I have checked it back in. The following morning I opened that same assembly from SmarTeam (readonly, so without checking it out) and immediately saw that none of my latest work was present in those files. I checked a bunch of versions (we hadn't done a global update yet) of the assemblies and parts that I had worked on, to see if my work was saved in any of the older versions. No luck. I guess that before opening the assembly, my latest work was still present in the local work folder, but by opening the (outdated) assembly from SmarTeam, the files in the workdirectory were overwritten, getting rid of the correct versions of the files. In the local workfolder the .cgr files presenting the latest work can still be found, but they are useless for reconstructing the parts themselves.

Main question here is off course: can any of you come up with possible reasons why my latest work was not reflected by the latest (or for that matter, any of the) checked in versions in SmarTeam?

The other for me unexpected behaviour of SmarTeam is that every now and then, when I check out an assy from SmarTeam, all higher level assemblies, all the way up to the top-level assy are checked out. It must be connected to the way we have set up the parent child relationships throughout our model. Can anyone clarify this for me?

So how our models are set up is that we have a couple of "support geometry" assemblies. Basically skeleton assemblies from which we copy appropriate points, surfaces, etc, and then we "paste special" them in the newly created parts, using "paste with link".
When designing in context, we project or intersect geometrical entities directly only within parts individually. When we need to use contextual geometrical entities from other parts, we always create publications for those.

Last thing is that I seem to have more issues with these problems on my computer than my colleagues on theirs. Can it be related to some setting or configurations in SmarTeam specific to my machine or am I just doing something wrong?

Probably, this is not a lot of information to go on, so if you need any additional information to see if you can help me, please let me know.

Thanks in advance,
Qluq

 

[cilici]

Hello,

Disclaimer: I haven't used SmarTeam for 6-7 years so I might remember things wrongly.

First question: Your assembly should have been saved with the latest modifications. It is standard behavior so I wouldn't blame SmarTeam for that. One explanation could be a database restoration without your knowledge. Check that with your admin and also ask him to have a look in the vault (your files might be there, they are useless from the point of view of SmarTeam but they could help you recover some of your work). Also, every user should have access to a Clean working directory panel where you can see what you have in that folder and in what state it is. Using windows explorer is not very helpful.

Second question: checking out parents is a default (?) option but it can be customized in the Admin panel. Ask your admin about this. It is also possible to choose what parents to be checked-out during the check-out of your product/part depending on the level you've selected for opening.

Third question: This is about designing in context related settings in V5. You need to make sure you work with the right settings (for example, multiple levels of CATIA on the same machine and improper Environment settings might lead to overwriting/loading the correct CATSettings you'd need for Designing in Context). Again, ask your admin about this.

Hope it helps,
Calin

 

[Qluq]

Thanks Calin!

have been looking around but not much of a solution yet...

Have found some other stuff though, but I am not sure it is (related to) the same problem: we have identified some parts that have a "contextual link" to their parent assembly. This in itself is already different from other parts at the same depth, because they only have links to other parts (all via publications). But what is really confusing is one of these contextual links was referring to an older version of the parent assembly. That older version also had a different Catia-name (ASY-0000462 instead of ASY-0000056) that the current version of the parent assembly.

When using SmarTeam save on the deviating part a warning pops up saying: "design links have not been updated because at least one of the contexts is missing". This makes sense because that ASY-0000462 has been deleted.

Is there some way to change this contextual link from ASY-0000462 to ASY-0000056, or delete the link and repair the part?

Really hope someone can make sense of this,
Qluq

 

[dougsnell]

In CATIA, you can modify the contextual link by right clicking on the Instance of the CATPart containing the link > Components > Define Contextual Links...

This dialog box will list the external references made in the CATPart and their pointed references. Provided all of these links are still valid in the current assembly configuration you can click OK in the dialog box and the Contextual link will be updated to the appropriate CATProduct. Which CATProduct, will depend on how your CATSettings are configured.

If, however, the external links are not connected in the Define Contextual Links dialog box, you will need to manually reconnect those links before the contextual link can be modified. The only way to remove the Contextual Link is to completely isolate the external references in the CATPart.

--Doug