Stefan, thanks for joining the discussion.
Hello Eric,
should your part "only" be inserted (AddPart) or should it be also automaticly constrained in the assembly?
Only inserted, constraining would be to complex (or impossible). For reference my company builds custom fluid processing systems. We mainly work with pumps, valves, plumbing, steel (angle, channel, etc), and plastic fabrication. Most systems are custom to the customer's specs, however we use a ton of components from various manufactures in our systems. The idea is to allow for fluid maintenance of our part library while keeping existing assemblies intact.
Edit:
Additional question: By whom and how the table will be created with the columns filename,type,material,size and (maybe)file_is_valid? Who will take care for the table?
I will make the excel sheet and maintain it. It will be a lot of work upfront but our library needs to be overhauled from the ground up. I would like to make sure all my work is not in vain a few years down the road.
I have not thought that through yet, still need to make sure it is possible, and will actually be helpful instead of convoluting the process by adding steps that do not make it efficient. Really this is suppose to make it 1) easy to find parts and insert them and 2) make sure I don't end up needing to do a library overhaul
again in a few years.
It will definitely have part numbers, part category (Tee, Reducer, Pump, etc.), material, description, file path and whatever else my fellow engineers want. Ideally the flow process would have drop downs (maybe?) where you select part category> then the option to select material>then option to select size. Then this would point to a specific cell that contains the file path for the desired part. All of this is up in air since as of today I recently just proved the concept that an Alibre script can read specific sheets/cells in Excel and return them as stings, which this is possible theoretically.
Edit2:
Do you have an approximate value for the number of files?
Nothing exact, but roughly 500-1500 at least. Keep in mind with plumbing we commonly use (for example) tees in half inch increments from 1/2" up to 12", which come in 4 different materials, so there are a ton of parts.
I do something like that in that my Library has (among other things) "Iron Pipe Size" component Parts (all nominally 72 inches long) Thus, I can Open (from the Library) a Part that is (say) "6-000 Sch 80 X 72-000 Long" edit the Length and then SaveAs (to my Project directory) it as (say) 6-000 Sch 80 X 48-000 Long knowing that the Dimensions and Density values are correct. [It should be obvious that they "48.00 Long" is a Stock Cut value and that the Finished Part will be at least .465 inches shorter to allow for mis-cut by the supplier).
Lew, this is an approach I use when I need to modify a part slightly. The issues is my company (which I am relatively new to) are not all on the same page as far as part descriptions, making parts accurate vs 'close enough' and so on. They are stubborn as some engineers are, so I'm hoping to make the system painless as possible so they will
want to use it. I will handle maintaining the data base and keeping it up to date. Its unfortunate that I cannot rely on them to do that. They are all very smart and do a great job at what they do, but we desperately need to standardize and that is incredibly hard to do with Alibre
and engineers suck in their ways!
I wrote a lot so I'll recap. My end goal is to have a folder that contains all our library parts. This folder will start out nice and neat, but as time goes on it will inevitably become disorganized from needing to add/update parts since you cannot move/delete files easily without destroying dependencies. My proposed solution is to let this folder get disorganized, but ideally you won't even notice since all part insertion will be done via a script that references an excel file that contains part data. If you need to see if a part is in the library, you can use excel functions to quickly and easily find parts. If we decide a part is no longer needed, or say a manufacturer completely revamps a ball valve and we need to replace the file we can add it to the library and update the excel sheet file path (but leave the old one in the folder). In effect this will keep all previous files intact, but remove that file from the part library interface. Make sense? My brain hurts but I promise the logic is there...
