Turning On/Off components using Part Family Table

[ScottThePainter]

I'm having a little trouble remembering how to accomplish turning on/off certain components of an assembly thru a part family table.

From what I remember, once you had set up a column for the component you want to turn on/off in the part family table you populated each cell with either YES or NO to turn it on or off. That is not working for me as it says that it is trying to load the file "YES" or "NO" rather than turning it on or off.

Using 0's and 1's does the same.

From what I've read here, you simply either leave the part name in the cell to have it be a part of the assembly, or you leave the cell blank to turn it off. That seems to work, sort of. When I 'apply values' for that row, I get a warning message on any components that I'm attempting to turn off stating that it will delete the component that I tried to turn off from the assembly as well as delete the column from the part family table. So it builds it without that component, but it also destroys the part family table and deletes the component from the assembly. After that, if I want to turn that component back on thru the part family table, I can't anymore because the column is gone.

Any suggestions?

 

[cowski]

Use component suppression by expression. The driving expression can be added to the part family table.

www.nxjournaling.com

 

[TaylorAnderson]

So, a couple of thoughts and trade-offs here...

Cowski's method is by far the easiest, and works fine as long as you are okay with having the suppressed components still lurking around in your assembly structure. If you have the toggle to display suppressed components turned on, the components that have been suppressed by expression will appear like these blue ones in your Assembly Navigator:

Some companies are okay with that, and others are not. You'll have to decide.

Including components in the Part Family table works really well, but can be a little tricky, mostly because of the side effects you've mentioned.

When using a Part Family, remember that the thing you should actually be consuming in your assemblies is not the Part Family itself, but the generated children of the Part Family. Generally the Part Family [parent] will be a 150% assembly containing all of the "options". As you generate each child (either directly from the Part Family Spreadsheet interaction or on-the-fly as you add them to an assembly) these be generated in a clean new part (or assembly) and these "children" will always be read-only. In contrast with the Component Suppression by Expression route, as you generate each of these "child" assemblies, each of their assembly structures will be "clean", and not contain any blue Suppressed Components, like above.

Now...

If you're trying to use a Part Family table to control an assembly that you're still working on, in a workflow where you're trying to just switch it between different configurations while you work, then you may just be misunderstanding what Part Families are for.

Part Families are intended for known configurations of parts or assemblies that are going to be almost completely static. (Standard parts, or vendor purchased catalog assemblies are good examples of this.) Users cannot edit Part Family members directly (again, they're always read-only) but can replace Part Family members with other Part Family members -- and can do this REALLY easily if the family is wrapped as a Reusable Component (see the standard parts in the Reuse Library for examples of this UI.)

And so...

If you're trying to do more dynamic editing of design assemblies, the Part Families are just not the right tool for this workflow. For this kind of workflow, you may want to consider Product Template Studio (PTS), which gives you codeless tools for wrapping UI around any part or assembly, providing a super-easy way to interact with the high-level options and parameters in a more dynamic assembly that you need to NOT be read-only.

And so again, if you can live with the suppressed components in your assembly, then Component Suppression by Expression is super-useful if the assembly in question is something that will need to be edited or changed over time. On top of this suppression, you can use PTS to make a simple UI to set all of the expressions correctly. Here's the UI for the example above, for instance:

PTS can also be used to add/remove/replace assembly components dynamically without suppression, if desired, using Visual Rules.

Remember that the children of a Part Family are always generated in a read-only state, and thus can only be edited by editing the Part Family [parent] and then regenerating the parts [or assemblies] from the spreadsheet.

Hopefully that long-winded explanation helps a bit.

Taylor Anderson
NX Product Manager, Knowledge Reuse and NX Design
Product Engineering Software
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc.
(Phoenix, Arizona)

 

[ScottThePainter]

Thanks for the replies from both of you. I remembered the suppression method shortly after posting and was able to make the 2nd method work for my needs. I am curious about the PTS though. How do I access that tool?

 

[TaylorAnderson]

Scott --

There's a great Learning Advantage course for PTS, if you want to learn more about it.

Up to NX 10, PTS runs as a Java Application outside NX. You can find it in the Windows Start menu, in the "NX Tools" folder of your NX installation.

Starting with NX 10, we've also migrated PTS inside core NX, where you can find it easiest using the Command Finder.

...and then see your sales rep about getting a trial license.

Good luck!

Taylor Anderson
NX Product Manager, Knowledge Reuse and NX Design
Product Engineering Software
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc.
(Phoenix, Arizona)