Batch rename NX4 files

[dakeb]

Guys,

We have about 14000 nx4 native files we want to globally rename and maintain the links in the assemblies. We don't have Teamcenter yet, is there a batch file we could use to do this?

Thanks

Dave

 

[hudson888]

Would cloning Assemblies work for you?

Check it out and follow up with another question if you wish.
If the changes that you need to make involve doing something simple like appending or or renaming prefixes or suffixes then you will probably have very little trouble.

I have wondered if you can save a file and perhaps edit it to get a more complex result. My theory being that if it were a text file and I already had a list of what I wanted the to and from names to be then the string manipulation and cut and paste steps are easily done using excel or similar kinds of programs.

I haven't time to test this out right now. Hopefully others will fill those gaps.

Cheers

Hudson

 

[dakeb]

Hudson,

Yes cloning will work within the context of a single assembly, but will it work when we have a number of top level assemblies that share common parts? We don't want to lose the links between parts and assemblies.

We don't think our hardware has the capacity to be able to open all the assemblies simultaneously.

I was hoping somebody had written a programme that would run overnight outside of NX to be able to rename all the parts whilst maintaining the links.?

Cheers

Dave

 

[hudson888]

Cloning will keep the links but the best way to do it is all at once from a master assembly working right through the whole product. It takes not much longer than it ordinarily would to copy all the files from one directory on disk to another.

I don't think you need worry about opening all the assemblies simultaneously, and if it fails you should know that it makes a copy of the files rather than changing the original so you don't destroy the original data. I haven't done a really big assembly for a while but even going way back to pre NX days I have done whole customer sites one assembly at a time and then rationalised the files when it was done. I am pretty sure we had no ill effects from creating a few double ups in setting it to maintain links and then overwriting one version of the linked to another, because it is basically only a set of correct file names that the native system needs to see in order to perform correctly.

Test it and I think you'll get it to work.

Cheers

Hudson

 

[dakeb]

I'm told that because we run on Windows XP and we only have 2G ram available, that as soon as NX hits the ram wall it just stops? Our most experienced cad guy says that cloning from a master assembly eats memory until it hits the ram wall and hang up (I often hear the guys yelling about out of memory messages). Can't it use hdd swap space?

My other worry is that there was very little in terms of filenaming convention in place (hence the need to do it now before it gets worse), and we could have a number of different parts with the same names (e.g. bracket.prt), but I guess we will have to do some hard labour to find all these and rename them individually first.

Thankfully there are only 14000 parts, not 140000.

Thanks

Dave

 

[hudson888]

Dave,

You're going to have to have a plan in order to get the job done. Fortunately you'll be able to interrogate the assemblies and save the results to spreadsheets quite easily using NX. But eventually one of the key things to identify is those parts that aren't used in assemblies or any that aren't already cloned as you go along.

Whenever I've done this for people in the past and we had more or less similar numbers of parts, we found it necessary to plan our attack gather all the information over a preceding week, and advise the users in advance. Then we shut down and cloned in stages over a weekend.

I also got hold of a pretty simple program off the internet called doublekiller.exe that does as the name indicates weed out double up copies of identical files in different directories.

Cheers

Hudson