hello,
I would like to hear users opinions about the way NX currently handles legacy parts,
I mean parts in which the material information was manually entered in the MATERIAL
attribute instead of being entered by means of the Assign Material command.
In NX9 these parts have the MATERIAL attribute deleted without any notice, something
very unfortunate as a piece of information is lost without any warning.
What's disappointing is that I didn't find mention of this behaviour in NX9 What's New
or Release Notes, so that change went completely unnoticed here when we migrated to NX9,
which is again unfortunate.
In NX11 an information window warns the user, which is better than NX9, yet the attribute
original content is still lost.
The only solution proposed by Siemens is to disable the automatic material attribute
creation/setting altogether, which doesn't make much sense as NX8.5 handled this case
better : the original attribute content is retained, it cannot be edited manually, yet
it is superseded by the Assign Material command. This way the original information is
kept yet the material automation is still enabled.
Someone may argue that in NX8.5 if a material was assigned to solid which doesn't
match the attribute content then there is a discrepancy that cannot be fixed, and this
is the reason for the automatic re-sync between attribute and solid information that takes
place in NX9 and beyond (which causes the MATERIAL attribute in legacy parts to be deleted).
Yet, even in NX11 a discrepancy might occur as there are parts that contain multiple materials,
and in that case NX can prompt the user about what to do, so the very same could be done
if a discrepancy is found between attribute and solid information or if there is no solid
information at all, as in the case of legacy parts.
I have submitted an ER (9105047) to have this implemented in NX, and in the meantime I have found
out that an identical ER was submitted by Chrysler earlier and closed as custom hotfix for them.
I wonder why this has not been turned into an enhancement for the general public rather than a
custom fix, as the problem can affects many (me, for one).