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asterisk in design table

Question asked by Mike Campbell on Aug 14, 2013
Latest reply on Sep 10, 2013 by James Luntz

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An asterisk next to a value in a design table seems to indicate that the value is not up-to-date. The asterisk disappears once the associated configuration has been activated but the design table has to be closed and reopened for that to happen. The question is, is there a way to accomplish this without cycling through all configurations before opening the design table?

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James Luntz Sep 11, 2013 10:09 AM
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*Bump*

I'm not getting it either. I'm in SW2010 with the same problem. Hopefully, I can add clarity to this and not hijack/derail Mike's issue. As I tried writing this out I am now thinking that I may have partially answered why the asterisks are used (see below), but I’m pretty much at the limit of my comprehension on this topic… good look making sense of my nonsensical digression:

I took over a part file with configurations built by a Design Table from another engineer and I get asterisks in some of the fields for each of the non-activated configurations. I can temporarily force values to write into excel by manually rebuilding each one of the configurations before loading the DT (as Mike stated). I did this thinking the newly pushed values in the table would remain static until next time the model updated and pushed new values to the table; it does not. After closing the part file and then moving on to its where-used assembly and BOM table the values drop out once again. I guess the table and dependent formulas within it would be unable to obtain the new SW information until the DT is once again reopened and maybe this is why the DT adds the asterisks to protect against this (since opening the DT pulls information from the part file and then closing the table pushes the custom props to update)? In other words, I’m proposing the configuration specific Custom Properties would otherwise never update until individually activated.

I tried to create a part and assembly example for this post and cannot seem to recreate a situation that would show the asterisks. Instead, my new example (“BOM Assembly.sldasm” & “Tube Configs.sldprt”) only shows the original formula I used to drive the custom properties and never change to the evaluated values from the model. Maybe the original part “beam22.sldprt” used a different formula in the DT to pull “SW-Weight”? Looking in the file properties, it appears the expression to evaluate are one-in-the-same, "SW-Mass@@exterior, long, 22"@beam22.SLDPRT".

Issues I’ve found:
1. ) The BOM table in an assembly with configurable parts seems to show Volume and Weight from the last activated configuration only and not based on configuration specific information. See BOM table in “BOM Assembly.sldasm”. Even then, there have been a couple cases where the “Weight” Custom Property is blank in the BOM table even though the model configuration is open and shows a mass in the part file.
2. ) By creating a custom property “WeightByConfig”, I can get the BOM table to be configuration specific, but I have been able to show incorrect information in the BOM table. If I change the DT of the part without activating the configuration it seems to remain incorrect (since the model does not rebuild in order to force a recalculation of the material properties). So long as that is the only issue, I guess I can trust myself to always rebuild any configuration for which input from the DT was changed.
3. ) My original goal was to get configuration specific Weight or Volume information pushed to the design table – I seem unable to recreate this, but I don’t think I ever did it the right way (assuming one exists). I had intended on creating some simple formulas to look at, say, rough cost of different configurations based on Weight within the DT itself. (Obviously, in this example I could use some algebra, but not in my real-world ones).
4. ) As an aside, each time after creating my new custom properties from within the DT and then closing the table, I get a message that “The following custom properties were not updated: “ and then listing the names of those Custom Props. Is this because the Property with the expression already exists and is unchanged? I guess this means that the only thing this information in the DT does is keeps verifying these user-created custom properties exist and creates them for newly created part configurations, right?
5. ) Aside #2 – since I’ve already wasted this much of your time and you’re obviously interested in the topic and most likely more knowledgeable than myself, how do I keep from getting a pop-up most every time I edit a DT asking to import more variables? I keep the tick box unchecked which indicates it will not prompt agian for the same vairables, but it does not seem to “save”.
p.s. how do I attach file to this bad boy? Here is a link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58915303/SW%20DT%20config%20files.zip
n/m I now see the attach file option after editing. I'm leaving the link too if that is somehow useful.

Message was edited by: James Luntz
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- SW DT config files.zip1.5 MB
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