Manually Defining the Title of a Part, Assembly, and Drawing
Typical Company Profile: Single user
Setting the Title
The simplest method of naming an item in 3DEXPERIENCE is manually defining the Title. This approach utilizes the default behaviour of your 3DEXPERIENCE platform. When a saving new SOLIDWORKS part or assembly to 3DEXPERIENCE for the first time, the Title can be set with a single left mouse button click in the Title field in the Save to 3DEXPERIENCE dialogue box. If the file has not yet been saved locally, the file name will be set to match the Title.
After the save to 3DEXPERIENCE has completed, the Description field in the ENOVIA properties dialogue can be used to capture more detailed information related to the item.
In the image below, a SOLIDWORKS part called Bracket.sldprt is saved to 3DEXPERIENCE for the first time.
The resulting Physical Product Title is “Bracket”, and the ENOVIA Description field has been used to capture a detailed description of the part.
When creating a drawing of a part or assembly many companies choose to have the name of the drawing match that of the referenced model. This ensures that a drawing is easily identifiable with its related 3D design.
When creating a new SOLIDWORKS drawing, the Title of the drawing’s parent part or assembly can be used as the Title for the drawing.
This is the default behaviour for a new installation of the 3DEXPERIENCE connector for SOLIDWORKS and is controlled by the MySession option “Use part or assembly file as new drawing title”.
If you do not want the Title of a drawing to be automatically set to the referenced model uncheck this option.
Modifying a Title
Once a Part, Assembly, or Drawing has been saved to 3DEXPERIENCE its Title can be modified from either inside SOLIDWORKS or in one of the web apps. For SOLIDWORKS users new to 3DEXPERIENCE, the most logical place to change a Title is in SOLIDWORKS. This is done with a single Right Mouse button click on the component name at the top of the feature manager design tree and then selecting “Rename Title” from the menu.
After the Title of a file has been changed, it must be saved to 3DEXPERIENCE for the modification to be fully applied. If a part or assembly being renamed has a related drawing, the next time that drawing is saved to 3DEXPERIENCE the Title of the drawing will always update to match its parent, unless the MySession option “Use part or assembly file as new drawing title” has been unchecked, or set to “Only When First saved”.
Note: The “Rename Title” command does not change the file name on disk. Once a part, assembly, or drawing has been saved to 3DEXPERIENCE its file name is fixed cannot be changed. From this moment onwards the Title is used as the primary identifier.
Tips and Recommended Practice
When choosing to adopt a manual naming strategy, by default SOLIDWORKS does not block the saving of an new component with a duplicate Title of a part, assembly, or drawing that has already been saved to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. However, to ensure that every component saved to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has a unique title, a SOLIDWORKS setting in the Collaborative Spaces Configuration Center called “Check File Title for uniqueness” can be enabled. This option can be set to either just warn a user if the Title is already in use (user can still save with a duplicate Title), or to block the save to 3DEXPERIENCE operation.
If the Title of SOLIDWORKS content needs to be changed its recommended that the change is done in SOLIDWORKS using the “Rename Title” command even though it is possible to edit the Title property in the 3DEXPERIENCE web apps and via the properties panel in SOLIDWORKS. Changing the Title via the ENOVIA properties panel can lead to mismatched or unexpected titles being displayed in SOLIDWORKS.
SOLIDWORKS shows the File Title and 3DEXPERIENCE shows the Physical Product Title. Technically, these are two different attributes. File Title will get pushed to Physical Product Title, but Physical Product Title driven by the web app won't necessarily get pushed to SOLIDWORKS File Title as you expect. This is particularly a concern when working with a multi-configuration file where Physical Product Title is a concatenation of Title and configuration name. The ability to edit a Title using the ENOVIA properties panel in SOLIDWORKS can be disabled by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform administrator using the SOLIDWORKS CAD Collaboration option “Editing Physical Product Title”.
Summary
For a single SOLIDWORKS user adopting the 3DEXPERIENCE platform who is already defining the name of each individual file and would like to continue working this way, manually assigning each Title is an effective approach to help them to rapidly adopt the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. The workflow of managing Titles and Descriptions does not require any platform configuration, and follows a similar methodology to one they are already used to, with the added benefit that any references will be maintained if a Title is modified.
For companies that work in a multi user environment, having each person create the Title of every item can also be very difficult to manage. Therefore, it is recommended that this naming methodology is only considered for implementations that involve a single or a very small number of users.