Solid Edge ST9 Design Manager and Pack and Go

By MLombard

The new Design Manager is the reincarnation of the old Revision Manager. It has been revamped with new icons, new functionality, and an update into a new century with a new lease on life. You can find the new Design Manager icon on the new Data Management ribbon tab in Solid Edge ST9. When you activate the Design Manager, Solid Edge disappears temporarily.

The Design Manager enables you to rename documents while maintaining links, move documents to new locations, replacing one part with another, assign document numbers, revisions and project names. You can even assign a life cycle type status and comments.

Design Manager still works like the Revision Manager in that you make all the changes you want to make and then press the Perform Actions button. Changes do not actually happen until you press the button. This saves time, and allows you to make sure you’ve got everything correct before committing to the changes.

Via RMB (right mouse button) you have even more options, including Where Used, Save As, Show Parents, Sort, and File Properties operations. This is a nice front end to the built-in data management tools ST9 has added to Solid Edge.

The Check-in and Check-out tools are available right in the Solid Edge Data Management tab and the assembly Pathfinder, but not from the Design Manager. You can see that the second part in the list above shows a pencil next to it, so there is an indication it is checked out, and a tool tip shows who is editing, so you can piece together the information you need to know about who is working on what.

The Reports tool enables you to get various types of bill of materials type of information from the Design Manager. You can set up the format of these reports including controls like fonts, justification, grid, column headers and sorting.

View and Markup is of course included in the Design Manager, as it has been in the past.

Pack and Go may have been the worst kept secret in ST9. While the deluge of Data Management tools didn’t seem to get leaked out, everyone keeping score knew that the much anticipated Pack and Go functionality was going to become available.

As you can see from the interface, you can copy all the files (including drawings) associated with a part or assembly to a new folder with new names, and/or zip up the new copy. This is great news for users. Pack and Go has a lot of uses, from archiving to data sharing.