One of the things in my current to-do list was to figure out how to display a LOV value along with it’s description. For example, If I wanted to attach the foundation level Model Velocity Unit LOV to an attribute then the possible values would be the numbers 1–7. More valuable to the user would be to show them the descriptions, which include m/sec, mm/sec, in/sec, etc.

Well, I didn’t know how to do that. Fortunately for me, I came across Dave Merrit’s “technical how-to get stuff done better and faster blog,” Dave’s Rave and his how-to post on how to attach both an LOV value and description to properties.

Like Johnny Carson used to say, “I did not know that.” So thanks, Dave!

You know what? Users are a pain in the butt. An awful lot of the work that goes into setting up Teamcenter is directed towards preventing users from making too big of a mess of things. And the very first thing that users will try to do to screw up your database is to mess around with the part numbers they assign to data. If a part number is supposed to be XXXX-YYYY, and you don’t have the proper controls in place, you’ll be pretty lucky if you don’t end up with thirteen variations of it: XXXX-YYYY, XXXX_YYYYY, CURLY.XXXX-YYYY, LARRY.XXXX-YYYY, MOE.XXXX-YYYY, XXXX-YYYY.REWORK, my_left_bracket.XXXX-YYYY, projectZ.XXXX-YYYY, etc. etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

I know because I’ve had to deal with the mess users have created, and because I used to be one of those users who contributed to the mess. (doh!)

So, what kind of proper controls can you put in place? Well, keep reading…