Naming Rules

When you create a new Item in Teamcenter Portal, it assignes it based on a naming rule. There is a default rule for this, but usually not a name any corportation can use without changes. Once possible solution is for each person that creates a new item to name it accordingly to how it should be set (which is full of possible user errors) or have Portal assign the names according to your company naming conventions. That’s what we’ll discuss.

There has been a nice program built into Portal since version 8 that allowed you to set virtually any set of naming convention. It also has the ability based on the type of Item created. For instance if you created a standard Item as a person in a design group the name would use a set of rules, if you created an item as a person in a checker group there could be a different set of rules. This goes the same for datasets and actions on the datasets.

The application is "Business Modeler". Essentially this is a front end to the .iman_env file. So you will need to have write permissions to that file in order to make changes. After the modifications are done you can view the .iman_env file and see what it added. However it is recommended only to use the Business Modeler applications to make these changes.

The Business Modeler is located under the Admin tab. You’ll need to also have correct permissions to access any applications under this tab. After you have the permissions taken care of, launch the business modeler. This document is based on version 9.x of Teamcenter. Version 9 gives you more options then v8 but these steps will work for both. The "Naming Rules" tab is the only tab we are interested in for this task.

The easiest and most basic step is: Enter a name for a rule,press the create button. Select the "Attach Naming Rules" sub-tab. Expand Item, Select Item ID, on the right side of the screen select your rule you just created in the previous step, attach (button on the bottom of the right of the window).

This did not do anything visible. It did add the naming rule to the item, which in this case is empty. It does show you how you create a rule and attach it.

To remove the naming rule, select the Attach Naming Rules sub-tab, set the Rule Name to the blank entry in the list (pull down), and Attach.

Depending on the interest of this topic, a more detailed explaination on how to create a usefull naming rule will be created later.