Open CATIA files from SAP DMS

[Former Member]

Dear All,

The client wants to view different drawing documents.

With the help of ECL Viewer I am able to open most documents except  CATIA Files.

Is there a way to open Catia files from SAP DMS?

[markus_deuter]

Hi Leon,

some tips from my side:

pls decide between CATIA V4 (*.model) and CATIA V5 (*.CATpart or *CATproduct or *.CATdrawing) file. V4 und V5 are different CAD systems.

Then you have to implement a CAD viewer like Christoph describes. ECL can not work with lots of CAD native files    ... no Pro/ENGINEER, no CATIA, no STEP, no IGES.

Second option is to include a conversion process.

E.g. you convert as following:

CATpart                     => STL

CATproduct               =>STL

CATdrawing              => PDF

Then you can run this by standard ECL viewer. But with STL you lost many features, like measuring, hiding parts in an assembly and many more.

Note: you need a CAD conversion engine for this.

Third option:

You can also work on 3D-PDF on this ... if this is possible on your requests.

Moreover to this, you can also implent a right hemisphere conversion server engine to convert CAD file to RH-files (*.rh) files and use the new SAP visual enterprise viewer which can be also embedded into SAPgui.

Look at this licensable feature on this pages for a short view

http://www.plmportal.org/de/der-nutzen-der-3d-bilder-bei-sap-plm.html

If you prefer to use a stand alone CAD viewer I can recommend you Actify's Spinfire.

Here you can see a demo on our system.

The viewer supports a floating license mechanism, so you need only 1-3 licenses on up to 50-100 users depending on your requirements.

Regards

Markus

P.S. pls rate if this was helpful ... thank you.

[christoph_hopf]

Dear Leon,

if you want to view CATIA files a working viewer for these file types must be called. This can be customized at transaction DC30 for the used workstation application. Go to "Define workstation application in network" and maintain for example parameter value %AUTO% %NO-LEAVE% for example.

The value %AUTO% should call the external viewer software that is used by Windows to display this file format. To avoid errors with this parameter please set also the flag "you cannot rename....." in the details of the workstation application.

Best regards,

Christoph