CATIA documents often reference other CATIA documents. A simple example may be a part drawing, where the drawing document points to the part document. A more complex example is file relationships created from contextual design.
The fact that document references are based on file names puts a strong emphasis on proper naming of your CATIA files.
An example of a problematic scenario is a situation where one designer, Joe, creates a bearing and names its part file Bearing while another designer, Mark, creates a different bearing size, yet still names its file as Bearing. Everything may work well, until both bearings have to be placed in the same product. This causes a conflict at the CATIA level and the user will have to rename one of the files. As mentioned above, renaming files can cause many problems. Documents that are looking for the file name may lose the link to this renamed part.
Recommendation
Therefore, it is recommended that SmarTeam generates the file name. It is also recommended that the filename includes a sequential number that ensures uniqueness.
Note: When generating the file name, SmarTeam adds an additional directory and therefore adds characters to the file name. Thus, in the case of a long name, the full file name may exceed the limitation of 256 characters for a full path.
