Do You Excessively Adjust the Access Rule Tree?

May 18, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 3

Last week at the PLM World Conference I attended a round-table discussion about Organization structures in Teamcenter. It was a wide ranging discussion that touched on several related topics, Access Rules in particular. Something came up in that discussion which was a bit surprising to me that I don’t really understand. I’m hoping I can get some of you to educate me a bit.

A couple of the attendees made the comment that their Access Rule Trees are constantly being updated. One admin had updated the rule tree back home three times during the four days of the conference. This really surprised me because the Access Rule Tree where I work is rarely modified. To be honest, my first reaction to hearing that others need to make frequent changes was that they must have a flawed process or data model that they’re working with. But… these are smart, experienced, people. So maybe it’s something else — maybe they’re dealing with more complex use cases than what we deal with, for example, and that drives their need.

So, what I’m hoping is that some of you who manage “living” Access Rule Trees could take a minute or three to summarize what the main drivers are for you to make a change to the tree. I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone with experience dealing with both static and dynamic Access Rule Trees. If you share some insight as to what were the fundamental differences between the systems driving the need, or lack of a need, to frequently make changes, that would be really appreciated.

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Should the BMIDE Stay or Should it Go?

May 16, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 10

The comments section for my earlier post about icon customization in Teamcenter 9.1, kicked off a discussion between me and The Teamcenter Heretic® about the BMIDE. I think a fair summary of Heretic’s position is that the older command line tools from iMan worked very well and that the BMIDE is overcomplicated and unreliable.

Since a discussion of the BMIDE is probably a topic of interest for many of the Dojo’s visitors I thought it should be promoted into its own post. You can review the earlier post’s discussion to catch up. And now I’ll try to lay out my thoughts on the topic.

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The Dojo is Back

May 15, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 0

Hello Friends,

The Dojo is back after having been offline for more than two weeks. I’ve finally stopped trying to mess around with hosting the site myself so now we now have a real web hosting company. When I started this site on something that was between a whim and a lark I wasn’t too sure what would become of it. So, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit to the expense of paying to host the site (for the record, it turns out I was overestimating the expense of hosting by a factor of four). I happened to have a piece of hardware at home that could be repurposed as a web server and a good friend with some experience in the matter to help me out getting set up. And it was pretty cool. It worked and it was fun getting set up.

However, the problems began rather soon. When you’re hosting a site yourself you’re at the mercy of everything. Power failure. Modem Failure. ISP failure. Router Failure. Server Failure. DNS Failure. I’ve experienced every one of those things. It reminds me of something my Dad told me about raising sheep once, all a sheep wants to do in life is to die and a sheep farmer’s job is to keep him from succeeding. Well, like a sheep all a web site wants to do is to die. Preventing that from happening can easily be a full time job. And I already have one of those. Not to mention a family. And certain needs, such as sleep.

The final straw came as I was packing for the PLM World conference (AKA, Siemens PLM Connections) last week in Las Vegas. I checked my site traffic for the past week and discovered that I had had zero visitors. Which was a surprise because to me it looked like the site was online. Well, it turned out it was only online to me within my local network. All of you couldn’t get in. I didn’t have time, or frankly the patience, to figure out what was wrong this time before I had to leave town. But I vowed that this was the last time, so when I got back my first priority was… sleep, honestly. Travel is exhausting. But the next day I got busy and set up an account with HostGator. Already the experience is a huge improvement. Their tech support was extremely helpful in getting my site transferred over from my server, and the site now loads much faster.

So, if you’ve ever been frustrated by plmdojo.com being offline or being slow, those days should be over.

All the best,

Scott

P.S. If you ever have problems accessing the site again, you can ping me on twitter, @plmdojo, to alert me.

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What’s New in TC 9.1: Easier Icon Customization and Icon Overlays

April 9, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 3

Because I like to torture myself by reading what’s new and cool in the latest Teamcenter version, which I likely won’t be able to play with for a long time, I started to read through the What’s New document for Teamcenter 9.1, which you can check out for yourself at GTAC’s website.

One thing that jumped out at me, because we had just been discussing the rigamarole that you currently have go through, was the news that as of TC 9.1, icon configuration will be done directly inside the BMIDE. You no longer will have to create a separate Eclipse project to customize your icons.

From the documentation:

To add or change icons on business object types, use the Fnd0Icon business object constant in the Business Modeler IDE. The icon definitions are placed on the server and used by the rich client. Previously, you had to perform a customization to add the icons. Now it is done entirely through the Business Modeler IDE.

I like the sound of that. I’d much rather have a single BMIDE template to maintain than a template and a separate eclipse project.

Icon Overlays

It goes on to say this, which I think was pretty interesting:

You can also use a property rendering XML file to overlay icons on the base icon conditionally based on property values. For example, you can decorate the icon with images to designate the business object’s state (status, remote, checked out, process, and so on).

As far as I know this is a new capability (please correct me if I’m wrong). I can think of plenty of uses for icon overlays. A common user request is to make more about an object’s state graphically obvious.

How well does it work?

Okay, the 64,000 dollar question is, has anybody tried this yet? How well does it work? If you’ve had a chance to deploy a TC 9.1 data model that customizes icons, let us know how it went.

Related Posts

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Configured Runtime Properties?

April 9, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 0

Hey everyone, a commentator over on my piece about Business Objects and Properties stumped me by asking me the difference between a runtime property and a configured runtime property. It’s a bit embarrassing but I not noticed that there was such a thing as a configured runtime property. Can anyone enlighten us? And is a configured runtime property something that is available for us customers to implement, or is that something that only product development at SPLM headquarters gets to do?

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Multi-Key Support in TC __?

March 7, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 0

A commentator on my earlier post about CAD-BOM Alignment asked a question for which I don’t have a good answer, so I’ll share the little I know and perhaps in the comments section someone who knows more about it can fill in the gaps. First, here’s Dan’s question:

In one of your previous posts you mentioned that Siemens claims that in Teamcenter 9 we will be able to create two different item types using the same ID… this could be very handy for creating Design and Part items with the same ID. Can you shed some light about this issue? are there any official documents that mention it?

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Item Revisions vs. ItemRevisions

February 28, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 2

Here’s a story about the latest snag we’ve encountered in the process of migrating from Teamcenter Engineering to Teamcenter 8.3.

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Keeping 2-tier Clients Up-To-Date

February 20, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 3

Over at teamcenter.blog.com, Logresh brings up the topic of keeping 2-tier clients up to date. It also came up not to long ago on forums at PLM World, so I thought I’d share the solution we came up with at my workplace. I don’t claim it’s the best solution, but it has served our purposes reasonably well.

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A SQL Query for Inventorying Teamcenter Items

January 26, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 4

As part of an upgrade/data-model conversion we have going on where I work, the application engineers from Siemens asked us how many items of each item type we have. So I came up with the following SQL query:

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Keeping Track of BMIDE Templates

January 4, 2012   •   By   •   Comments 9

I’ve got a tip to share today, but frankly, I’m hoping someone out there has a better solution — so if you do, please leave a comment and enlighten me!

The Problem

One advantage to the new BMIDE way of developing a data model is that the data model now exists as a set of XML files which can be managed with a version control system. It is very useful to be able to track changes to the model over time and to be able to coordinate development with others, however the problem is, how can I tell which version of the data model is actually deployed to a specific instance of Teamcenter?

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