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This article is based on Karen Dougherty’s Best Overall User Presentation at the 2002 PTC/USER World Event in Atlanta. Note that this technique is based on the use of Pro/INTRALINK 3.2

Family tables are a powerful tool, providing an excellent way to create and maintain certain types of parts and assemblies in Pro/ENGINEER. Vaulting family tabled parts and assemblies in Pro/INTRALINK adds to the challenge of maintaining these files.

Guidelines for Creating Family Tables

 

What’s a Pro/ENGINEER Family Table?

From the Pro/ENGINEER Help files:

Family tables are collections of parts (or assemblies or features) that are essentially similar, but deviate slightly in one or two aspects, such as size or detail features. For example, wood screws come in various sizes, but they all look alike and perform the same function. Thus, it is useful to think of them as a family of parts. Parts in Family Tables are also known as table-driven parts…Family tables promote the use of standardized components. They let you represent your actual part inventory in Pro/ENGINEER. Moreover, families make it easy to interchange parts and subassemblies in an assembly, because instances from the same family are automatically interchangeable with each other.

Other examples of table-driven parts or assemblies are “made from” parts, product families, and flat to formed parts. An example of a “made from” part is a die-cast housing that may be used to make several different parts simply by tapping holes to various thread sizes or parts that may be identical except for color.
It is important to have company standards or best practices in place to clearly define when and why to create a family table. This accomplishes a couple of things. Standards minimize confusion for new users and contract personnel as well as for the “old timers.” They also maximize accountability for all users and maintain consistency in model creation, thus increasing the reusability of models and enhancing downstream use of parts and assemblies.

Here are some questions to consider when defining standards:

  • What are our naming conventions for the generics and instances?
  • What is the maximum number of rows and columns allowed per table?
  • What type of part or assembly should be made a generic?
  • What constitutes an instance?
  • Should nested family tables be used? (Note: We don’t recommend creation of nested family tables because of the level of complexity when checking them out and using or modifying them in Pro/ENGINEER with Pro/INTRALINK.)
  • How do we handle instances and generics that are no longer valid parts? Do we delete instances from the table or comment them out?
  • Do we delete instances from Commonspace? (Note: We recommend against this practice because it means that history is no longer maintained and baselines are removed. We simply remove the instance name from the table and check the modified generic into Commonspace.)

Answers to these questions may differ from company to company based on business rules and processes.

Other recommendations include:

  • Assign a librarian(s).
  • Leave the Generic and Instances for the library objects Locked by the librarian.
  • Create only the objects necessary for re-use.
  • Set up a Commonspace library folder.
  • Set the Folder authorizations to View or Read Only, except for librarian(s).
  • Reference TPI 21326 at www.ptc.com.