Suggestions for Future Work

This methodology was created using the CADDS5 Family of Parts software. Therefore, some of the information contained in it is specific to this software. However, a significant amount can be applied to products from other vendors.

The search engines are generic enough that they could be modified to work with any program that stores its parts in individual files. Unfortunately, some parametric modelers do not do this and store all parts in one large file for each user.

The CADDS5-specific parts of the generate server could be modified to issue commands for other programs that accept text commands, and can read these commands from their standard input (stdin in UNIX terms), or be given the name of a file which contains commands to execute. If the CAD program can read variable values from a text file, the server could be modified to read the appropriate values from the text file and write them into another file in the appropriate format. Otherwise the appropriate commands to modify the variables could be issued directly. The CAD program could then be instructed to read in these values, regenerate the model, and save it under a new name.

Here is an example of this for CADDS5 without the ``Family of Parts'' software license.

Activate Part fpts.handle-round
Activate Drawing A
Change Variable Name L Value 2 Go
Change Variable Name H Value 1 Go
Change Variable Name OD Value 1 Go
Regenerate Model Accept
File Part Filename fpts.handle-round-family.2
Exit Part Quit
Exit Session

For this method, there would have to be either a standard drawing name to use, or the drawing name would have to be included in the catalog. The Change Variable commands could be replaced by Read Variable Filename fpts.handle-round.values Overwrite if the variables and values were placed in a file called values.var in the master part's directory.

Another topic that was mentioned during one of the C5SC meetings was the possibility of automating the creation of the text file. One possibility would be to have a program that prompted the user for the names of the variables, and then the name of the member and the values for each of the variable. It would then create the family table, properly formatted. This would be feasible for small tables, but for large tables, entering the data using a spreadsheet would still be the best option, as it allows the user to copy-and-paste data from one entry to another. If the part vendors were to supply the data on the parts in a standard format in a text file, then the automatic generation for large families would be possible. A program could be developed to read in the data from the vendor's file, and then output it in the proper format for the _tbl file.

Another area that has potential for further development is the search engines. The searches could be expanded from a simple text matching search to a more complicated search that will allow the user to enter ranges of dimensions or multiple patterns for each variable.

References

Last Modified: Wed Aug 28 14:41:29 EDT 1996