Examining Your CAD File to Identify Properties To Be Mapped

Before you map your CAD properties (also referred to as parameters) to aPriori, you need to know which ones you want to map. CAD systems that support properties provide a way to view and modify them. The specifics will vary from system to system but should be fairly easy to identify. This example describes PTC Creo parameters. Adjust the example for your particular CAD installation.

To identify CAD properties to be mapped

1 Start your CAD system and open a part that contains properties that you wish to map for aPriori.

2 Display the part properties. This example assumes that the CAD system is PTC Creo, in which case you would right-click the top-level entry of the Model Tree and click Edit Parameters or Parameters (depending on Creo version) on the context menu. Adjust this step for your CAD system

3 In the resulting properties display, review the available properties and make a list of the ones that you want to map for aPriori. Also note which, if any, should be mapped to aPriori system-defined production inputs (Process Group, VPE, Material, Description, Revision, Annual Volume, Batch Size) rather than to User Defined Attributes (UDAs).

In this example, we will map the Creo "ITEM_DESCRIPTION" parameter to the aPriori "Description" system-defined attribute, and the Creo "MATERIAL" parameter to the aPriori "Material" system-defined attribute. We will also plan to map the following Creo parameters to aPriori User Defined Attributes that we will define in the next section: REV_LEVEL, CURRENT_REL_NUMBER, and PROJECT.

Note that "PROJECT" is a bit of a special case: there is an aPriori system-defined attribute named "PROJECT", but it is not one of the production inputs that can be mapped to a property. So, we will map this to a new UDA named "PROJECT_ATTR" just to demonstrate that you can have UDAs and project inputs with the same name, and to caution you about this situation when planning your mappings.

Also note that this example maps the CAD "REV_LEVEL" property to a UDA named "REV_LEVEL". You could also have mapped this (or a different CAD property named "REVISION" if it existed) to the aPriori system-defined attribute "REVISION". The XML for this alternative mapping is shown commented out in the XML screenshot in the previous section.