OK, when you change, as
cowski mentioned, Assembly Preferences indicating that you want the 'Descriptive File Name Style' to be 'Description' what this means is that you want the Assembly Navigator to show the part file's actual 'Description' as stored in the file header. Now IF a part file does NOT actually have a 'Part File Header Description' defined, the Assembly Navigator will display instead the part file name inside of the arrow brakets, <> , to indicate that this is NOT really the 'Description'. BTW, this has nothing to do with Teamcenter, and is actually something that NX has supported for years, back when it was still called UG, in fact I'd say that this is maybe a 30 year old feature.
Now you may ask, how do I assign a 'Part File Header Description'?
There are a couple of ways; you could write an NX Open or GRIP program, where you would discover that there are actually TWO difference 'Part File Header Descriptions', the one were talking about here and another 'secret' one which can ONLY be assigned and read by another NX Open or GRIP program. BTW, one of the features of these two 'Part File Header Descriptions' is that they can be easily read by NX Open and GRIP programs without having to actually first OPEN the part files. In other words, they can be accessed while they are still sitting on a disk somewhere. This 'feature' was useful back before we had PDM systems like iMan, and later Teamcenter, if users wanted to write their own 'data management' applications and utilities (remember this was back before modern operating systems as well with their ability to add OS level tags to files).
So where do I go to manually define the 'Part File Header Description'?
Go to...
File -> Utilities -> Edit Work Part Header...
...where you will see a dialog which will allow you to enter a 'Description'. Also you will find information like the part files actual name, it's creation date and time as well as another setting called the 'Status', which you can set to any integer value up to 16959. Now this 'Status' setting does nothing, it's strictly what you make of it, keeping in mind that this is also something which can be read or modified by an NX Open or GRIP program WITHOUT having to first open the part file. In fact, to show you what I mean, there is another function at...
File -> Utilities -> Edit Other Part Header...
...where we can select any other part file, even if it's NOT currently open, and we can access these same options and read this same information and even edit the 'Description' and set the 'Status' as long as we have 'Write' access to the part file.
Anyway, this should solve the mystery as what the arrow brackets mean and how we can leverage their usefulness if we so desire.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
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UG/NX Museum:
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