Driving Custom Types With Custom Properties

Posted January 3, 2008

by Community Admin1

One of the most powerful features in Productstream is the ability to assign an item “type”. A type allows you to set a flag on an item that helps control its intent for use, and in turn the properties that are associated to it. Let me quick cover a few reasons you might employ an Item Type before we get into the guts of how it’s used.

First off, an item type by default is something like “Part”, “Assembly” or “Purchased”. These are great default types and they correspond to the associated file types in Inventor and also the BOM levels in AutoCAD Mechanical. But why would you want certain properties in some cases vs. another? Let’s take an example of the most common from a cad perspective; material. Material is something such as “Steel” or “Plastic” and represents the physical characteristics of it. In the case of Material this only relates to a Part and not an Assembly; Assemblies aren’t made of a material, they’re made of the material that the parts are made of.

There are other cases that are common as well which might lead you to create custom types. Let’s say for example Electrical components or Pneumatic components. These have specific properties like “Maximum Operating Pressure” for Pneumatics and “Voltage” for Electrical. With each case you can see that these properties are very important, but only to the actual types you’re interested in.

Let’s look at an easy way that you can reasonably automate this each time a new file is assigned an item.

1) First off you need to tell the Inventor files the type that it belongs to. This can be done by creating a custom property that will represent the part’s type. In this example I’ve created one called “Type” and set its value to “Pneumatic”.



2) After this file is added to the vault or checked back in we can start to set up Productstream. In the administration tools start by creating some properties that are required for your particular type. In this case we’ll create a couple of properties that are for the “Pneumatic” type; “Tubing Size” and “Pressure”. In this example it’s important that we set the value of “Display on Item” to “no”; this will ensure that no all types get these properties.



3) Next we need to set up the custom Item Type. Create one with the EXACT same name as you put in your custom properties. The spelling needs to be exact for Productstream to understand the match. Create a new type called “Pneumatic”



4) In order to ensure that these properties show up on this new type we need to select “Edit Policies…” for this item type and change the “Display on Item” value for “Tubing Size” and “Pressure” to “yes”. This will ensure that only the properties related to that type are displayed.



5) Finally we need to set up a simple mapping to teach Productstream to honor this value. Simply mapping this new “Type” custom property to the Productstream Item Type is all you need to do to finalize this.



6) The end result is shown below. Not only is the Item Type set as soon as the item is “assigned” to the part, it also shows the correct properties which allows you to either fill them out manually or automatically populate them from the file’s properties.



Why would you do all this? Searching of course! The more data that is available for searching the better you can find and reuse it. Just think about this in the context of doing a project. Just think if you could get an accurate list of every Pneumatic component that fit a particular tubing size?

What about that Electrical component and your voltage requirements. Selecting from your existing inventory is always a better practice and Productstream can help you get your job done faster and with less errors!

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