TeamCenter: Item Name, Item ID, Item Description...purpose?

I've spent a long time looking into this and it's very confusing.

You have tags called: ID, name and description
You normally have 3 levels in TC.
-Item master
-Item (I think that's what it's called)
-Drawing File (I think that's what it's called)

The top 2 are different from the bottom one in terms of what it calls what.

For the Item Master and Item:
ID is the part number eg: F-9434-2343
Name is a descriptive name, eg: Plate 3
Description is a description like "New plate for use in the development rig."

TC shows the ID and Name joined together in my version. So on the screen it'll show
F-9434-2343 - Plate 3.

The Drawing File items are different and I can't remember off the top of my head what is what now, but it's different from the other 2. Something like Name is the file name and ID is the ID and name of the higher level joined together.
It was so confusing thtat I wrote a document for my own use.

I find it really annoying that I have to edit the properties of the 3 items separately. I then found that if you edit the properties of the top item you can click on an icon (looks like a globe) which allows you to select the children and edit the whole lot together. As I found out today, it's a very bad idea to change the name of the drawing file item to the descriptive name. I had a right palavaer before I managed to recover everything today.

Tom,

Thank you for the reply. That is what I am concerned about. I would like to configure the system to link some of these attributes (parameters) between the 3D model file, the drawing file and format title block, and the Teamcenter fields. I am just not sure about it now.

It gets confusing because the title block of our detail drawings will allow for three lines of text. Not sure if I should have 3 description attributes (one for each line). I would like to link this info to the item name (description) in TC.

You have an item let us call it A, under A there are item revisions like A-1 and A-2 and so on...
Under a item revision there are possible datasets, drawings, excell sheet etc.

Which each CAN contain a couple of attributes. The 3 lines of text of your titleblock are attributes linked to a item revision A-2 for ex. So you can have different annotations (text notes) per item revision. They also have nothing to do with the attributes of the item itself (in the most cases) (if the need is there you can link them)

The item A is also called an object (or ID), and it has a name and a description. These are also attributes and are (in TCE9) DB_PART_NO for the item itself DB_PART_NAME for the name and DB_PART_DESC for, you guessed it, the description.

As Tom stated if you change the description of an item you could get something like : A-"this is the description"

Now for your question about the link , if you create your own attributes for the note lines, you can have as many as you like and they will be synchronised with TC as you save your part, synchronised with the part-revision, because if you link them with the item itself then these descriptions will be the same for each item revision you create.


Best regards,

Michäël.

NX4.0.4.2 MP10 / TCE 9.1.3.8_build_0711 / NX6.0.2.8 / NX7.0.0.9

Belgium