problematic behavior with associative Measure Bodies feature

[potrero]

NX6.0.1.5 MP1

One of the methods to obtain a MASS parameter and Attribute(say, to link to a drawing), that's been suggested by Siemens, involves the creation of an associative Measure Body feature.

It seems there is a bug or problem with how the feature works, when a body - initially part of the Measure Body feature - is deleted from the part.

Lets say you've got a part with three solid bodies. Create an associative Body Measurement feature (Analysis > Measure Bodies (associative)) and select each of the three bodies.

Now, let's say that you actually need to create one of the bodies using a fundamentally different method.

If you delete the old body, the Body Measurement basically seems to crash - try to edit it, and it shows 0 bodies selected.

On the other hand, if you edit the Body Measurement feature FIRST, and de-select the offending body, the Measurement feature stays functional. You could then add the new body to the measurement feature and move on.

Bottom line is that the Body Measurement feature would benefit from enhanced robustness by staying functional regardless of whether constituent bodies are deleted or manually removed from the measurement.

Anyone have any thoughts or experience with this issue?

 

[JohnRBaker]

I'm running from home at the moment and do not have access to a copy of NX 6.0.1.5, but when testing this using NX 6.0.2.8 and I delete one the multiple bodies referenced by a Measure Body feature, I get a notification that...

Deleting or editing these objects will affect other features or constraints in sketches.

...and selecting the 'Information' button gives me a screen listing the operation that I'm performing, in this case deleting one of the bodies, and the fact that this was a parent object of the Measure Body feature and that it has been affected by this operation. Granted, there are no details as to exactly what this means, but it's not like we performed the operation with no user feedback whatsoever.

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

 

[hudson888]

I've used these in the past and do find them problematic in ways that I'm not altogether critical of, but nevertheless could point out to you. Simply put if you create a body measurement for a largish assembly as an expression, you can for example use it to support associative text for the mass of that assembly shown in a note on the face of a drawing. The catch is that if you have the assemblies containing this opened you're going to want to suppress updating that measurement if you intend to change things otherwise recalculating the masses for every model edit will slow you down considerably. Most of the time changing the assembly structure results in the body measurement falling over on you anyway, and it all becomes too manual to maintain.

What occurs to me in dealing with this process is that the business of maintaining and presenting mass data on drawings and in parts lists is either something that I'm doing wrong or that the tools I have been using such as they are could be improved upon in terms of dealing with assembly masses as an aggregate of the component masses rather than requiring a body measurement since the current weight data appears only to be maintainable for solids rather than assemblies.

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum