Are you instantiating powercopies and you keep getting a message about formulas?  It’s annoying and screws up your workflow.  Here are few solutions to avoiding the warning message.

First off, you are probably using DP R3 or R4, or CATIA BN 17 or higher.  That’s because in CATIA V5R16, the braintrust at DS decided to add this ridiculous and completely annoying message, saying something about putting the formula somewhere.  You didn’t have to concern yourself with this message before in the previous versions of CATIA/DP, so why now?  What changed?  Well, nothing really.  When you click OK, it just puts those formulas in the main Formula Set, as expected.  So instead of quickly instantiating a bunch of PC’s into your part, you are stuck doing an extra click to “confirm” the location.  Too Slow!

One way to eliminate this, is to put the relations pertaining to that PC into a dedicated Relation Set.  If you have the Knowledge Advisor WB, just add a new Relation Set into the main Relation Set.  Then copy and paste that new Relation Set into the Geometrical Set that contains your PowerCopy.  Unfortunately, you cannot directly place your new Relation Set inside of a Geometrical Set; you can only build up a Relations Set Tree with the Knowledge Advisor WB.  Once you have a place to put your Formulas, then right click on all the relevant relations, then find the “Reorder” option.  You can either place your Formulas “In” or “After” an object, so in this case, you want to put your relations “In” the new Relation Set.

But what if you have the cheapo version of DP or CATIA.  Knowledgeware is pricey.  Well, first off, you could find someone that has the KA WB and have them make you a CATPart with an empty Relation Set and empty Parameters Set.  Then you can take your KW treasure box back to the office, open it whenever needed and copy and paste those goodies into any Geometrical Set you like.

However, that’s a lot of work.  Here’s a little trick that DS may not even know about:  Make a new Part.  Make a simple parameter and simple relation.  That will automatically generate a Parameters Set and Relations Set.  Delete the original relation and parameter.  This will leave the Parameter Set and Relation Set empty.  Now open up your PC CATPart.  Copy the Relations Set from the empty part into your PC part into the desired Geometrical Set.  Oh yeah.  That’s the sweetest hack yet.

Lastly, if you want to avoid the formula warning, you can work with Ordered Geometrical Sets.  But good luck with that.  It’s such a pain in the ass to use OGS’s that you might as well model the whole thing manually.  And OGS’s are terrible to debug.

Now whenever you instantiate your new PC with the embedded formulas, you shouldn’t receive any warning messages about the location of the relations.  These relations are saved locally in the Output PC Geometrical Set, so there is no dispute on where the formulas would go.  Great huh?

Using Powercopies with formulas can feel like this.

Using Powercopies with formulas can feel like this.

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