Wednesday, 17 June 2015

Publications


Publications are used in CATIA Assembly design and are particularly useful when it comes to contextual design with links.  Think of the primary function of a publication as an intermediate level between a source element and a contextually designed part.

Let me use an analogy I use with my students: imagine you were designing  a luxury motor yacht.  A large proportion of the interior fittings will be using the hull surface of the boat as a limit.  The hull is subsequently redesigned and the surface replaced.  If you have never had a situation like this, let me tell you what happens: when you open each contextually designed part, they will tell you that their contextual references cannot be synchronised.  You then have to manually replace the reference - replace boat hull surface one with surface two - a very long drawn out process.



So how does a publication help?  If the boat hull surface was published, because the contextually designed parts are looking at the publication not the actual reference, you only have to modify the link once by changing what the publication is pointing to in the source document, not each and every contextually designed part.

Other advantages include:
- The publication of an element can be easily recognised - they are in a separate folder in the spec tree - this also helps finding elements for constraining.
- Published elements can be swapped out with other elements with the same name - complete parts can be swapped with others and then update assemblies accordingly.


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