Accessing CATIA Catalogs

Design engineers who need to instantiate catalog components (parts, products, V4 model etc.) can access their catalogs using one of the following methods:

Searching in the SmarTeam Vault

Searching in the SmarTeam Vault is a way of accessing catalogs.

  1. Click the Catalog Browser icon.

  2. If the default catalog displayed in the Catalog Browser is not the one you are searching for, depending on how your administrator configured your CATIA session:

    • click the Browse another catalog icon to open the File Selection dialog box that enables you to navigate to the shared directory containing your catalog.

    • or perform a SmarTeam query: just click the SmarTeam icon icon or SmarTeam Query from the Browse dialog box.

    Depending on on how your administrator configured your CATIA session, the File Selection dialog box may appear. In this case, just click the Cancel button to close it and enable the SmarTeam Query capability in the Browse dialog box.

  3. Open the document of interest.

    The CATIA Part will be copied into your working directory and the CATIA product in your assembly session will reference it. However, once the CATIA Product is checked-in into the SmarTeam vault, the next time you retrieve a CATIA Product into the working directory (check out operation), standard CATIA Parts will not be copied into your working directory and will not be referenced to the shared workspace.

Searching in the Shared Directory

If your librarian has created shared directories:

  1. To search for your catalog in a shared directory, click the  Catalog Browser icon.
    Available in several CATIA workbenches, the Catalog Browser provides interactive commands to browse catalogs and lets you instantiate components.

  2. If the default catalog displayed in the Catalog Browser is not the one you are searching for, depending on how your administrator configured your CATIA session:

    • click the Browse another catalog icon to open the File Selection dialog box that enables you to navigate to the shared directory containing your catalog.

    • or from the Browse dialog box, click the File icon to open the File Selection dialog box.

  3. From the File Selection dialog box, navigate to access the shared directory.

  4. Open the document of interest.
    Using this method, the CATIA Product creates a reference to Standard CATIA Parts in the shared workspace.

    For information about shared directories, see Creating and Saving a Catalog. To get precisions about instantiating catalog components, see the Component Catalog Editor User's Guide.