What happens to Mating Conditions when moving to NX8.5? 3

[NXherbie]

Hi,

Upgrading to NX8.5 soon and was wondering if anyone (here) knows what happens to Mating Conditions when loading legacy (large) assemblies that use them to position their components? I think I read somewhere (some time ago) that after NX7.5 they will "automatically" get converted to Assembly Constraints upon loading (because Mating Conditions will no longer be supported)?

My concern is that my windows-workstation will run out of memory on loading (if this is the case) with NX returning an "Out of memory" message indicating that the NX session is corrupt and that parts should not be saved.
I recently ran a test to load a large assembly that contained Mating Conditions and instructed NX to convert Mating Conditions to Assembly Constraints for ALL LOADED PARTS (playing safe). It got to 94% of the conversion and failed.
I wonder if I'd see a similar (erroneous) result if I used 'Refile' with the "-convert_mcs" switch?

My initial thoughts are to use refile and process the sub-assemblies first (i.e. treat them as top-level assemblies in their own right) and perform the conversion (and save). When I then load the ultimate top-level assembly, all of the lower level sub-assemblies will not require conversion. Will that work, or will NX still want to fully load the sub-assemblies, just to determine that a conversion is not required - thereby exhausting my workstation's valuable memory?

NXHerbie
NX7.5/Teamcenter 2007

 

[JohnRBaker]

While it is true that there IS an option in Customer Defaults which if set will force the conversion of Mating Consitions to Assembly Constaints when files are opened, this option is OFF by default.

That being said, there are NO changes in NX 8.5 with respect to how legacy Assemblies with Mating Conditions are handled. The only changes are that we've continued to improve the tools used to convert Mating Conditions to Assembly Constraints, but they are still under the full control of the user, either to set the automatic conversion status or to manually perform the conversion when needed.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

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

 

[looslib]

Your method of starting at the subassembly level should reduce the demands on the CPU and memory when doing the upgrade.
If you are running 64-bit NX on a 64-bit OS with at least 8GB of memeory, you should not have to worry about running out of memory!


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

Ben Loosli

 

[JohnRBaker]

Note that if there are no reasons to alter the position or content of the Components in an Assembly or a sub-Assembly, there is NO real need to convert the Mating Conditions since they will still be honored. And even if a legacy sub-Assembly is added to new NX 8.5 Assembly there will be no need to first convert the Mating Conditions. The only time that you absolutely MUST convert Mating Conditions into Assembly Constraints is if you need to make significant changes to the positioning of the Components beyond simply editing expression driven Mates, such as distance or angle, since you can still edit those with no problem. Also, if you wish to add new Components to a legacy Assembly, since you CANNOT mix Mates and Constraints, you will need to convert before you can use Assembly Constraints to position the newly added Component. In fact, if you open a legacy Assembly and you attempt to access the Assembly Constraints functionality, you will be asked if you wish to either convert or delete the Mating Conditions before you're allowed to continue.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

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

 

[jpetach]

NXherbie,

The refile -convert_mcs" switch also supports a -dry_run switch which allows a report to be generated without saving the conversion or changing the part versions. This may be helpful in isolating which part(s) are causing the issue and why they are not happy.

HTH,

Joe

 

[NXherbie]

Thank you - one and all!

JohnRBaker - you have confirmed my belief that Siemens will continue to support the Legacy Mating Conditions 'structure' and editing of their parameters. New Positioning constraints will require a conversion as mixed constraint types are not supported i.e. assemblies cannot contain a mixture of Mating Conditions and Assembly Constraints.

looslib - 64bit is a considered option, but means we may have to re-write/adjust 32bit custom code we've written to check the results of refile exercise.

jpetach - This could be a useful forerunner to the full refile execution. I assume the -convert_mcs will only apply to sub-assembly and assembly parts that contain Mating Conditions... and that it will ignore refiling of parts that have Assembly Constraints? If this is the case, we may need to run refile twice, first run will process any parts that have Mating Conditions... the second run will process the remaining parts that are not already at NX7.5. We expect to be running searches on the database to determine lists of parts that need to be processed. the first list will identify just those assemblies that have MC, the second will identify the remainder of parts/assemblies that are not at NX7.5.


Why refile? It provides us with a means of bringing the part structure up-to-date which will improve loading times. File compression can, it is said, also improve loading times over the network. There is no 'touching' of the release date in teamcenter. The only 'con' I can think of will be that a file might be 'refiled' several times when they are shared by multiple assemblies further up the top-level assembly tree - not a big problem - just a time consuming issue.

Thanks again - this has been a useful thread for me.

Regards,
NXHerbie

 

[JohnRBaker]

A comment on the 64-bit issue.

Note that NX 8.5 will be the LAST Windows version of NX which will be available as a 32-bit implementation. Starting with NX 9.0, we will only be supporting 64-bit versions of NX. Windows was our last 32-bit platform as our Linux and Mac-OS versions have always been 64-bit only.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

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

 

[jpetach]

NXherbie,

The -convert_mcs will cause any part that are refiled that contain mating conditions to be converted unless the -dry_run switch is also included. When both switches are present no parts are actually refiled. If only the convert_mcs switch is present then all parts are refiled and those that have mating conditions are convert to assembly constraints. So the refile could be two passes if the -convert_mcs and -dry_run switches are both present. The first past would only report the conversion outcome. This would allow for the possibility of improving the conversion outcome by editing the parts (mating conditions) with the earlier version of NX to improve the outcome of the conversion. The second pass (without the try run would change the part version tot he current NX version and convert the mating conditions. It is not required to use two passes, it is possible to refile all the specified parts and convert the mating conditions for the relevant parts in one pass. Using two passes is a strategy that can provide an opportunity to inspect and / or revise the existing mating conditions if needed before converting to a newer version of NX.

Regards,

Joe