Old parts loading in assembly do not appear in structure (anywhere!)

[bw2839]

Anyone who has experienced the above situation, I am open to suggestions on how to rectify the problem. My UG assembly is opening older versions of sub-assemblies, but the parts don't appear in the Assembly Navigator. There are no interpart expressions and all of the linked bodies refer to the latest parts in the structure, from what I am seeing. Some "references" show as many as three versions (revisions) of the same part or assembly. If I go to "Replace Component" they show up in the list of parts, but I cannot physically select them to "replace" them so-to-speak. Please help! Due to the line of work I'm in, I cannot post or attach any file related info, sorry.

 

[cowski]

Do you have any filters active in the Assembly navigator? If so, turn them off. Also make sure all the "Include <suppressed/non-geometric/reference only> components" options are checked (right click in the assembly navigator to find these options).

 

[bw2839]

I have all of those turned on as you can see in the attachment. We have looked for so many things that might drive this problem it is driving my user's group crazy. Thanks for the reply.

Doug

 

[looslib]

Are these older components at the top level or in sub-assemblies?
Do you have Load Latest turned on in your load options?
Check the order of your search paths. Using a ... at the end will search sub-folders in the order that the sub-folder was CREATED, not alphabetically!


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

Ben Loosli

 

[cowski]

Are you working in native mode or with a PDM/PLM system (such as Teamcenter)?

 

[JohnRBaker]

Also, if you have sub-assemblies in your assembly make sure that they have been added to the main assembly using the 'Entire Part' Reference Set.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[bw2839]

OK, so to answer a couple of question first:

We are in NX6 native, no PLM. The older components only appear to load at the top line assembly, in this case, a drawing file. I believe we have the "Load Latest" turned off via the Part Version settings being off in the customer defaults so that we can control what UG loads. This is to control drawings revisions better, because there are times we don't want all of the latest parts. It's a timing thing.

The perplexing thing is that the assembly structure was manually updated either by replace components or cloning or a combination of both, so the old components/assemblies should have been fixed or updated.

Ben, even though I understand what you are saying about search paths and alphabetical versus created, I'm not sure what impact that has on my situation. I could understand if the parts were supposed to be part of the structure, but they were not. It's almost like the top line assembly is carrying these "tags" along somehow that are not supposed to be there anymore.

And John, even though I appreciate your input, we almost exclusively use Reference Sets at every level to control component staging and to cut down on the number of entities that come along for the ride at the upper levels. Trust me, with the size of our files, this is a must. We have been doing this for years with little or no problems, so we can't just up and do a 180 now without a lot of grief. I am also not sure how that could affect my situation?

Now for the interesting part! I tried just about everything I could think of when I noticed it seemed like the parts were only loading at the top level. So, I opened the assembly below it first, turned load options to "Structure Only", "Partial Loading" and "Load Parents-->None", then opened the drawing file above it. I noticed it didn't seem to load the old parts, so I did a part cleanup and saved the top level. I closed out everything, reset my load options back to All Components, Load Interpart and All Levels and re-opened the drawing file again, and WALLA! no old components. Now explain that?

Thanks you all for your input and help, but this is obviously a real teaser to look into.

 

[looslib]

If you loaded structure only, then load options and search paths don't come into play. Your assembly was saved with the proper files tat you wanted. When opening with search options and paths, you are encountering older files before the latest files and these are being loaded instead of what you want.
My comment about search paths and the order they are seached would indicate that this is your problem. You have older versions of files in a folder that is being searched before the latest files.
Load latest does NOT actually load the latest file on your system. It loads the latest file from the first folder that it finds the first match of your search string portion of your file name in. Using the ... and the fact that sub-folders are searched by creation date can lead to the wrong component version being loaded.
Look in the log file and see what folder the components are being loaded from when you open the drawing first versus when you open the assembly first.



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

Ben Loosli

 

[bw2839]

I get what you are saying. Question is, why does it think it needs to load these parts? They are not physically in the ANT structure or anywhere that I can actually select them to remove them from the "loaded" structure. They are not supposed to be there, so why does UG think they should be? Is there some kind of tag that is leftover from a previous version of the assembly? Is it confused somehow? If UG doesn't think it needs to incorrectly load it then the problem goes away.

 

[looslib]

Are these old parts, old part numbers that have been replaced or old versions of the same part number?
Old versions is easier to explain.
Replaced part numbers is harder, but can be caused by picking up older versions, which referenced the old numbers.

Look in your log file and see if you are actually loading the latest version of the file you think you are from the right folder. The information is in there, just it takes some digging to find as NX is very verbose in the logging of data, especially file opening data.




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

Ben Loosli

 

[GeoffD00]

bw2839 - I have seen the same problem here where NX is loading a part into memory but that part is not visible in the ANT and so it is not possible to close the part. I basically came up with the same method to fix that you have used - load structure only, run part cleanup (deleting unused items) and save.

One tool I have found helpful is the ug_edit_part_names.exe utility using the -list option.It will list out all references of the assembly (output can be redirected to a file). You can then review the output file to see if there are some unwanted references - ie that the structure needs to be fixed. As Ben pointed out also, the log file is a useful place to search regarding what the NX session has loaded. Neither of these methods tells you WHY NX loaded these files in the first place - I'll leave that for someone else who may know.
Geoff