Configurations from Design Table

[drawoh]

I am working on a space frame screwed together out of steel angle. I am trying to control around forty instances of nuts, bolts and washers from a design table. The following controls work on my washers and nuts, but not on my bolts.

$CONFIGURATION@PLAT079 STRUCTURAL BOLT UN<*>
$CONFIGURATION@PLAT080 STRUCTURAL WASHER UN<*>
$CONFIGURATION@PLAT081 STRUCTURAL NUT UN<*>

The error message is that the column heading for the bolt contains an invalid feature name. If I set the wildcard to a number or to certain ranges ( eg. 10-50), the design table works, even if my design intent doesn't.

I am still on SW2003 SP5.0

I am pretty certain I have deleted instances of bolts, and that the count of bolt instances has gaps. Could the design table be trying to control these missing instances? With component patterns, I have over 150 instances.

Is anyone familiar with this one?

Can I renumber the instances?

JHG

 

[ScottHeiden]

It looks like your design table references an instance of the bolt that doesn't exist in either your bolt configurations or your space frame configurations - probably the latter one.

Note which particular instance(s) of the bolt are causing errors:

ex: "...contains an invalid feature $CONFIGURATION@PLAT079 STRUCTURAL BOLT UN<53>", etc.

If you look in the Feature Tree for your space frame assembly you probably wiil not find "$CONFIG....BOLT UN <53>" listed as being part of your assembly any more. You'll find the bolt listed in the feature tree, but it'll be listed as a different instance (say "$CONFIG...BOLT UN<83>"). You'll need to change "<53>" to "<83>" in your design table and everything will work fine if that's all that's missing.

Another possibility is you've spelled the $CONFIGURATION header wrong in the design table. An extra space between words or a capitalized letter will be considered an invalid feature by the design table.

Take a look at these things and let us know how it goes.

Scott

 

[drawoh]

ScottHeiden,

Thank you.

The configuration header definitely is spelled correctly. Otherwise, nothing would have worked.

I hacked around and have sort of worked around this. I caused the problem by inserting a lot of component patterns, and deleting some of the components. I have constructed a list of instances that works, but the system is horribly uneditable. I will delete this design table column when I finalize the drawings. Fortunately, I do not perceive a long term requirement to change fastener sizes. This whole exercise may still have taken less time than changing each and every instance of the fasteners.

I am now guessing that I could have deleted regular parts without causing problems. If I edit the patterns I deleted from, I can see the missing instances listed in the "Positions to skip" window.

JHG