Costing a component is not an all-or-nothing operation. You can do different things with a component at different stages of costing. Knowing this might save you time depending on what you need to accomplish.

When you first open a component, aPriori retrieves visualization information, displays the part in the component viewer, and displays the Cost Guide. At this point no GCDs have been extracted and no costing information has been processed. This stage is useful for quickly opening a CAD file and visually inspecting its contents. Since no information has been processed, you cannot save the part at this stage.

As soon as you proceed to the second tab (see GCD Tolerances tab on page 1), the GCDs are extracted. At this stage, even though you have not yet costed the component, you can save it along with its automatically-generated thumbnail. This means that the component will now be viewable in search results, although its cost information will be blank or “0”.

The final stage is costed: the component will appear in search results, and cost fields will be populated with values based on the most recent cost operation.