Ok, So I need to talk through this to make sure that my idea is viable. Pre-warning, this is a long rambling post.
I want add a UD field that holds what size the print is, (A, B or D). I pull a list of prints using a BAQ/dashboard feed it into excel. I’m currently am calculating a field to guess on the size, but it’s a guideline more than a rule. So I am looking for a way to the guideline to create this initial size, and then being able to modify the size for the exceptions. For convenience sake I would like to be able to see it/modify it in a couple of different places. (for a little backround, we have an excel sheet with a macro that goes and finds the PDF print, writes that to a tif file, because it works better in excel, then creates a sheet for each part with the job number and quantity required. It uses the size from my list to set up the sheet as an 8.5x11 or 11x17. There are buttons on each sheet to resize that sheet if the size is wrong. Then it redoes everything on that sheet.)
First and usually, we will want to modify it while in the engineering workbench. That’s when we are looking at the print to make the methods and the easiest time to modify it. So for that use, I would lean toward adding it to the partmtl/ECOMtl table.
However, I don’t want to have to check out the part/recheck it back in to change that since the person printing out the prints (who might find more exceptions) doesn’t usually mess with the BOM’s. So for that case I would lean towards just putting the print size on the part master.
So I see many possible solutions. First is to make a UD field in all of the places and then make BPMs to try to synchronize them. I’m pretty sure that this is possible and something that I could get working, although it could get ugly.
The second (and probably better) solution that I see is to only put the field in the Part table and make a customization that can save to the part master from the engineering workbench. I don’t really know how to do this, but I would imagine with a little custom code in the customization could be done fairly cleanly.
The third solution would be to make a REST call from excel whenever someone hits the resize button for sheet. (maybe we have some learning to do…)
A fourth option would be to make the dashboard that I created to display the prints an updateable dashboard so it shows the part number and the print size and you can just change it when you are displaying the print there. That might be the cleanest/easiest solution. (that’s why I need to talk it through with someone, I wouldn’t have thought of that without typing this up.)
The last/laziest option is to simply put it into the part master and just open that up when we need to change it, but what’s the fun in that?
I’m leaning toward the updateable dashboard combined with the REST call from excel, (If we can figure out how to get that working)
Thoughts on which is the best option? Other ideas?
