Managing the Revisions of a CATProduct Document

As you work with an assembly, you can make continuous revisions to it. SmarTeam protects and manages these revisions in the same manner as a part.

However, an assembly is more complex than a part since it consists of many components. It is essential to maintain the integrity of an assembly by performing life cycle operations on the assembly and its children, in coordination with each other. SmarTeam ensures that the integrity of the assembly and its children is not jeopardized by disabling life cycle operations.

In addition, SmarTeam provides several lifecycle options which can help you manage your assembly. For example, you can choose:

  • Propagate Operation
    to check in or check out the assembly and its components at the same time
  • Relatives Being Modified
    to view the parents or children of the document that are currently being modified
  • Show Parents
    to display the parents of a document. You can then select parents and check them out as well.

These life cycle commands are only available when you choose Check Out or Check In  from the SmarTeam menu. They are not available when you check out/in a document from the CATIA menu.

Protecting the Integrity of an Assembly

The following examples show how SmarTeam protects the integrity of an assembly.

  • When you release an assembly, its children must be Released as well. For example, if an assembly has ten subassemblies, each one must be assigned the Released status.
  • You can only move a subassembly to the Obsolete vault if its parent assembly is also Obsolete.
  • To perform a revision operation on an assembly and all its children simultaneously, SmarTeam provides the Propagate Operation option. For example, if you wish to check out a Stump Preacher Guitar and all its ten subassemblies, you can check them all out simultaneously.
  • You have the option to perform a revision operation on an assembly and not on its children, or perform a revision operation on a child and not on the parent assembly.
    For example, you can check out a Stump Preacher Guitar assembly from the vault and leave the children in the vault.
  • You can copy the children of an assembly to your desktop so that you can view them but not modify them. The status of the children remains Checked In, while the status of the assembly is Checked Out.
  • You can check a subassembly out of the vault independently and leave the parent assembly in the vault.