About Managing Piece Parts

This topic provides an overview about the Manage Piece Part command.
The structure data is generated using the Generate Piece Part command. When you do some changes in the source data, propagating these changes to the generated detail design data is a cumbersome job.

The Manage Piece Part command lets you propagate the changes from source data and features to target data.
  The changes in a source data (that is, the structural data from SFD and SDD) or a source feature (that is, a part from the source data which is used for piece part generation) occurs due to:
  • Renaming of source feature and piece part.
  • Moving piece parts within the product structure.
  • Moving the source feature position
  • Performing piece part generation, in context with connected features.
  • Creating new source features.
  • Deleting source features.
  • Deleting obsolete piece parts.

A piece part is considered out of date when the source feature’s Last Modification timestamp is later than the piece part generation execution timestamp of the piece part. You can view the source feature’s Last Modification timestamp can be viewed in the Properties dialog box.


The Manage Piece Parts command enables you to:
  • Search for all piece parts for a given source part.
  • Search for all piece parts for a given source feature.
  • Search for all piece parts that are out of date from a given source feature. Additional filters are available for COG, Area and length.
  • Delete the piece parts found from one of the above search criteria. Isolate the links on parts that references the deleted piece part.
  • Generate piece parts in context with a given source feature.
  • Generate piece parts for only the modified or new features.
  • Move the .CATPart reference files of deleted piece parts to a different folder (File-based only).