Note: This document was created by Robert Parotto on 8/3/2021
Background: These guidelines & recommendations should be followed by all Windchill/CAD users to ensure optimal Windchill performance & avoid workspace corruption issues.
General Tips & Best Practices
- As a rule, a workspace is intended to be temporary and should not be kept longer than 6 months.
- New workspaces - should be created for each specific project or CAD work/task. * Its recommended you do not combine multiple work/projects in one workspace unless the work is related to each other.
- As a rule, a workspace should be deleted as soon as your work on the project/task is complete
- Workspace name convention – Name each workspace with a descriptive “unique” name.
- Recommended convention – “motor design 06-29-21”.
- Using the date created in the name ensures the name will be “unique” and the date is helpful to identify the age of the workspace.
- Check-in your work when.
- Other team members need to use your CAD/eBOM for their work.
- After major CAD changes/updates you would like saved to the common space vault.
- When you need to send copies of your CAD data to outside vendors/suppliers.
- This ensures the revision shared is captured in the vault history.
- Workspace “Context”
- Always create your workspaces in the correct “context” Windchill Product or Library where your work is associated with.
- This ensures when you check-in the files will go to the correct context by default.
- Note: it is possible to work on files for different contexts in one workspace.
- However, this will require you to manually set the proper location in the workspace prior to check-in for each file that will need to go to a different context.
- If the files exist in the common space vault, the context for your workspace should be the same as the location where the files are in the vault.
Performance Tips •
- Clear your workspace cache regularly.
- Keep the number of workspaces you have to a minimum number.
- The more workspaces you have the slower the system will be.
- Keep the number of files in a workspace to a minimum number.
- The more files you have in a workspace the slower the system will be.
- Create a personal custom “lite” workspace display.
- The display should only include the file name, revision & status fields required for CAD work.
- The more fields/attributes displayed in a workspace the slower the system will be.
- You can toggle this display back to the default or full attribute display at any time.
Avoiding Corruption Tips
It is possible for your workspace or local Windchill cache to become corrupt. If this happens, you may lose work that has not been uploaded or checked in. To avoid workspace/cache corruption follow the guidelines outlined below.
- Workspaces should not be used for long term data storage (files not checked-in).
- The older the workspace is the higher the risk of corruption will be.
- Never start more than one session of Creo on your system when connected to Windchill!
- Never run Creo connected to windchill from more than one computer at a time!
- Use the workspace synchronization command frequently and after all major changes/updates to CAD data in a workspace.
- Use the workspace clear cache command at least ones a week.
- Never reuse workspace names!
- Deleting a workspace & then later creating a new workspace with the exact same name as a previous workspace can cause corruption issues.
- Never use the system generated/named workspaces!
- These can easily become corrupt due to the not unique name issue noted above.
- If your previous session of Creo hung, aborted or did not cleanly close, you should synchronize your workspace & clear your Windchill cache before resuming work in Windchill.
- Repeated crashes or abnormal close/abort of Creo is known to cause Workspace/Windchill Cache corruption.
- At the end of each working day ensure that you close Creo so that your Windchill session does not remain connected.
- As a rule, you should also reboot/restart your system daily. Typically, you would do this at the end of the working day.