Tube and Pipe Copy Design

[aflesch]

Maybe @cbenner or @Mark.Lancaster can help me out here.  I recently posted an suggestion to the ideas board regarding Tube and Pipe copy design being very cumbersome and @cbenner indicated there may be an easy solution to the problem I have been having.  Below I have included a screenshot of a typical tube and pipe assembly for a hydraulic power unit that I deal with on a regular basis.  As you can see there are 295 unique parts in this assembly that all need to be renamed and given a new file path when performing a traditional copy design on the parent assembly.  This is incredibly time consuming and there are 590 opportunities for a keying error.  

My workaround has been the "Make Adaptive" command available from the right click menu in the assembly environment when selecting the T&P assembly.  This has the advantage of automatically generating the file names and folder structure to match the new parent assembly.  It also takes about 5% of the time required to do a traditional copy design.  There are, however, two main disadvantages to this method: (copied from my Inventor Ideas post): 

1.  The Tube and Pipe assembly being copied and all of its children must be checked out from the Vault prior to selecting Make Adaptive.  If it is going to Save As and replace all parts why does it need the original checked out?  This creates issues when users forget to go back and Undo Check Out on the original Tube and Pipe assembly since it is no longer a part of the open assembly and doesn't show up in the model tree. 

2. All fittings connections are lost.  There needs to be a way to copy the Tube and Pipe assembly without losing all fittings connections.  Since the Tube and Pipe assembly was constrained to the origin prior to the Make Adaptive everything appears to be connected correctly but all of the connections are gone.  

Here is the copy design window for just the tube and pipe assembly.  As you can see, there are multiple levels of file names and folder structure that need to be changed for EVERY hose. 

Any advise you can give on an easier way to copy design this would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks, 

Adam Flesch

[cbenner]

@aflesch

Here is what I do that takes most of the pain out of copy design, though it will require a bit of work up front. In the copy design window, add a project relevant prefix to all of the parts as you rename them. This time through, it doesn’t help you, but next time you copy the design, you can use the find and replace tool to greatly sped things up. Most of my skids have close to if not more than 10,000 components.

In Tube & Pipe, if you right click on the Master Run, one of the context menu options is to name parts as they are created. This is another option, but it can become cumbersome also.

Experiment with these, you may find that one or the other or a combination will work for you.