10 Teamcenter Preferences You Should Know

July 11, 2012 • By • Comments 11

There are many Teamcenter preferences that you can customize. Knowing which preference to change can give you tremendous control over the behavior and appearance of Teamcenter. Listed below are some of the preferences which I find most useful to configure. For the full documentation on each preference, refer to the Preferences and Environment Variables Reference. You can download the PDF from GTAC.

So, here are some of my favorite preferences:

    Teamcenter Preferences for Identifiers and Naming Rules

    These preferences affect how IDs and names are assigned and used.

  1. ASSIGNED_ITEM_ID_MODIFIABLE

  2. ASSIGNED_ITEM_REV_MODIFIABLE

    3. These two preferences determine whether or not you can edit the item or revision ID provided by the Assign button.

  3. NR_BYPASS

    4. Creating naming rules to enforce proper naming conventions is a Very Good Idea. However, sometimes you may need to create an item that violates the naming rules — often when dealing with legacy data. Using this preference you can allow DBA users to bypass the naming rules. One warning: if you use naming rules to convert IDs to all upper or lowercase, NR_BYPASS will bypass that behavior too. Any DBA user that’s used to the system correcting his case might be surprised.

  4. ITEM_first_rev_id

    5. As you might guess, this preference changes which rev ID is assigned first.

  5. <Dataset Type>_saveas_pattern

    6. This preference defines the expected pattern that dataset names will follow. It doesn’t enforce the pattern, however when you copy the dataset to a new revision the name will automatically update to incorporate the new Item and Revision IDs if the pattern was matched for the old dataset name.

    For example, if your have item revision 1000/A containing a dataset named 1000-revA and defined your saveas_pattern to be ${ItemID}-rev${RevID}, then upon saving to 2000/B the dataset name would automatically update to 2000-revB.

    Teamcenter Preferences for the User Interface

    These preferences affect the user interface. They control what is and what is not seen by the users.

  6. CR_allow_alternate_procedures

    7. I’ve talked about this preference before. This determines whether or not users can choose from all of the workflow templates when submitting objects to a process, or if they only see the list of templates defined for the specific object type they selected.

  7. com.teamcenter.rac.ui.perspectives.navigatorPerspective.IWantToSection

    8. Teamcenter 8 introducted a “I want to…” menu to the main navigator window that gives you hot links to whichever menu choices you want. For example, you can give them a link to launch the New Process dialog with one click instead of having to navigate to File → New… → Process. Users can configure their own set of links, which are saved by setting this preference. If you want to give all users the same I Want To… dialog, set it up for one user using the GUI dialogs. This will create a user-level preference for that user. Then create a new Site level …IWantToSection preference with the same values as your template user.

  8. QRYColumnsShownPref

    9. You’ve created custom queries specific to your business needs to make your users’ lives easier. But if they don’t see them they’ll never use them. Configure this preference as a site preference listing the queries you want your users to use most often and those queries will show up at the top of the list in the advanced query dialog.

    Teamcenter Preferences for for NX Integration

    These preferences affect your NX sessions.

  9. TC_NX_SavedQueries

    10. If your users are primarily working in NX you can give them access to your favorite queries in NX’s Advanced Teamcenter Search dialog by adding their names to the values of this preferences.

  10. TC_part_types_display_filter

    11. This preference determines which items types are available from the NX File→ New dialog.

    Special Bonus

  11. Make Your Own Preference!

    12. If you’re writing your own Teamcenter customization you can have it check the value of any preference you want, including one you created yourself. It’s a handy way of configuring your customizations. One hint: give your custom preferences a common prefix, much like your template prefixes, to help you quickly find all of your preferences and to avoid collisions with any out-of-the-box preferences Siemens provides.

Which preferences do you find the most useful? Please share them with us in the comments below!

  • Teamcenter Heretic

    My favorite use of preferences is for Debugging my ITK methods and handlers.
    There are a few types of debugging that I like to provide:

    1) Basic user level debugging
    2) More advanced Admin debugging
    3) Full developer type spewage debugging

    I use preferences to allow each of these three levels to be set.
    One of the nice things about this method is that you can segregate and protect your debug information on a granular level even down to a specific program.

    The level can even be changed while a session is running.

    I also like to use preferences to control most program configuration parameters like output file locations and such as it means that I can easily keep my DEV/TEST/PROD inputs and outputs segregated.

  • https://twitter.com/total_plm Ilya Chaykovsky

    Hello Scott,
    Is there a preference that can do nearly the same with itemID?
    I mean, e.g. we save a rev (2000-00/A) as (using SaveAs) a new item and its initial ItemID would be “2000-00″. Then we just change “2000-00″ to “2000-01″ and get the new item.
    Maybe, do you know other way to do this?

    • https://twitter.com/total_plm Ilya Chaykovsky

      Ow, just found myself. Assign + ASSIGNED_ITEM_ID_MODIFIABLE=1 works almost as needed.

    • http://plmdojo.com/ Scott Pigman

      Hi Ilya, I don’t know of a preference for that. If you’re willing to look into ITK code, take a look at User Exits (http://plmdojo.com/programming/controlling-part-numbers-user-exits/), in particular look into creating a callback fro USER_new_item_id().

  • Mike Hallack

    Good list.

    My contribution would be as follows:

    DRAG_AND_DROP_default_dataset_type – Gives new users an easy method to add datasets into the database.

    QuickLinksSection – I removed the Web links and MyViewMarkup sections as we don’t use them.

    and finally,
    Quick_Access_Queries & the corresponding Quick_Access Queries_Attributes – New users gravitate towards the Quick Search box for searching. This set of prefs setups those default searches.

    • http://plmdojo.com/ Scott Pigman

      Those are good ones, Mike. I’ve used the Quick_Access_Queries & QuickLinks. I have to try Quick_Access Queries_Attributes and DRAG_AND_DROP_default_dataset_type.

  • http://www.facebook.com/alexey.sedoykin Alexey V. Sedoykin

    Hi Guys!
    I use “Confirmation_shown_on_reservation_dialogs”
    and i set value to TRUE.
    This settings hide confirmation dialog to Check-Out/Chek-In operation.

    • http://plmdojo.com/ Scott Pigman

      That sounds useful, thanks for sharing!

  • Alex

    Hi folks,

    also suggested: TC_NX_allow_attrsync_master_with_item when working with the NX Integration.

    “Allows synchronization of NX attributes for UGMASTER to the properties of its Item and the Form objects associated with it.”

  • Steve Niemira

    Don’t forget these helpful ones in 8.3:
    TC_show_checkedout_icon – shows the checked out icon in the navigation tree next to the object.
    HiddenPerspectives – choose what applications you wan’t to hide from users. I usually limit them to Structure Manager, My Teamcenter, Workflow Viewer, Change Manager, Lifecycle Viewer.
    _DefaultChildProperties – what relationships to display under an ItemRevision
    _PseudoFolder – what relationships to display as a pseudofolder under an itemrevision

    • http://plmdojo.com/ Scott Pigman

      Thanks, Steve, those are some good ones. I didn’t know about TC_show_checkedout_icon – that should probably be a site default!