Arrangement Driven Cable Routing Path

[Corey1776]

I haven't been able to get this to work with Arrangements but given how arrangements work I thought it would have...
I create a cable routing that follows a clamp when that cable assembly is installed into a higher next assembly.
The cable assembly is defined as a deformable part and the spline routing is deformed to follow the yellow guide block.

I create one arrangement and have the cable in this orientation.


Then switch to another arrangement and move the yellow block which in turn moved the cable.


Unfortunately it appears both arrangements look exactly the same. I verified all the components are set to individual position under each of their properties.
I even tested placing an independent item unrelated to the cable and that appears to function as expected. The component moves with the activation of each arrangement.
I'm guessing given the deformable part is part of the situation it's causing the arrangements not to take on the component position that drove the cable in the first place.
Hopefully I'm wrong because this would be a great function to have with cables that have different routing based on movable components.

[Corey1776]

Playing around with the movement of parts within the assembly. I'm not sure what causes the features to update when a part is moved since when you drag something and complete the movement the spline updates and the various other items come along for the ride.

But when you switch between arrangements this update of features doesn't appear to behave in the same fashion.

Though I came across this item in the NX help file:

When you create or edit an Assembly Arrangement, consider the following.

• Assembly arrangements directly control the positions of components but not of geometry. "Control of geometry can occur when it depends on component positioning."

"Can occur," I guess implies it sometimes won't?

I also found if I place two components into an assembly and draw a line that is associative to both components then move either component the line updates with each move.

And as said previously if I move a component in another arrangement and activate that arrangement the line will not update to the new location based on that second arrangement.

But also if I activate that arrangement and move the component the line no longer sees the moved component as its associative link and will no longer follow that component. When I go back and activate the arrangement I created the line in and move the component the line will now follow the component as it did before.

Do part navigator features lose associative links when going from one arrangement to the next?

Here's a video capture to convey what I'm trying to describe.

[Corey1776]

Is there a Siemens Engineer that has any insight into why Arrangements break references and don't update associative features like splines when components are moved.

They update if you move a component within the arrangement, but they don't update when you switch arrangements as shown above.

[Daniel_Jansson]

Did you find a solution? I suffer the same problem.

[BenBroad]

@Daniel_Jansson,

Is your problem also related to routing?  Routing is arrangement specific and will only work in the arrangement it was created in.

Arrangements move components, and change usage of constraints.  They don't update features, or other objects.   So to do arrangements with routing, entities like paths, and stock feature would need to update with changes to the displayed arrangements.

ER 7491233 was submitted as the result of this thread requesting "Arrangement Driven Cable Routing Path".

Regards, Ben

[Corey1776]

Unfortunately, as Ben said, the constraints and the related routing constraints within Routing itself are all specific to the arrangement they were created within.

And not surprising, the mentioned ER (7491233) was written and submitted by me. I've talked with the Siemens assembly manager about this as well and he told me this is a limitation of how arrangements were designed work. The constraints and constraint information driving the routing is specific to each arrangement. Hopefully this can be relooked at by development and adjusted to make this work sometime in the future, but in the current NX architecture with arrangments this currently isn't possible.
An alternative is to move the components and constraints within the arrangement, but once you switch arrangements those constraints are no longer valid.

[Daniel_Jansson]

Ok, to bad. Thanks for the reply!

Have a nice weekend // Daniel