Managing Teamcenter attributes

Owned by Copy Page Tree
Sept 20, 2017
4 min read

Syndeia makes it possible for system engineers working with SysML to get, compare, sync, and populate attributes on Teamcenter requirements, requirement specs, and paragraphs from/to requirements in the SysML model. This capability will be extended to Teamcenter items / item revisions in general in the next release of Syndeia. The following sections present details of the new capability.

The Syndeia Profile provides stereotypes for Teamcenter requirement, requirement spec, and paragraph that can be used to control the specific attributes for these Teamcenter items that will be obtained from Teamcenter, or populated in Teamcenter, or compared/synchronized between SysML and Teamcenter. Figure shows the Teamcenter-specific stereotypes in the Syndeia profile for MagicDraw.

The specific attributes of a Teamcenter requirement, requirement spec, or paragraph that Syndeia will get/populate/compare/sync are listed under the corresponding stereotypes and start with the prefix ro_ (indicating read-only attributes) or rw_ (read-write attributes). The stereotype tag names follow the convention: ro_ or rw_ where is the internal name of the attribute in Teamcenter, as obtained from using BMIDE—Teamcenter’s schema modeling environment. For example, the attributes of interest for Teamcenter requirement revisions (TC_Requirement_Revision) for MagicDraw are current_id, owning_user, body_text, and object_desc.

Attributes with the prefix ro_ are read-only attributes. This implies that their values can be obtained from Teamcenter when generating SysML model elements or synchronizing from Teamcenter -> SysML. Attributes with the prefix rw_ are read-write attributes. This implies that their values can be read from Teamcenter when generating SysML model elements or synchronizing from Teamcenter -> SysML, and their values can be populated in Teamcenter when generating Teamcenter model items or synchronizing SysML -> Teamcenter.

Users can add more or remove existing ro_ and rw_ tags corresponding to Teamcenter requirement-related attributes in any of the three Teamcenter stereotypes in the Syndeia profile. However, if every user in an organization / group selects a different set of Teamcenter attributes and adds tags to the stereotypes, it will result in issues when sharing models among the group members. Also, all users should not be modifying the Syndeia profile. It is highly recommended that the lead modeler (system engineer) in a group/organization updates the Syndeia profile with all the Teamcenter attributes that are relevant for that group/organization. He/She should then make the profile available to all users who can add the profile to their models but not modify it.

Teamcenter requirement / requirement spec / paragraph -> SysML

When a user drags a Teamcenter requirement, requirement spec, or paragraph from the Teamcenter repository to the SysML model in the Connection Manager of the Syndeia Dashboard, Syndeia dynamically looks up the ro_ and rw_ tags in Teamcenter requirementrelated stereotypes in the Syndeia profile to collect the specific Teamcenter requirement / requirement spec / paragraph attributes whose values will be brought over to SysML. Teamcenter attribute values will be set as values of the ro_ and rw_ tags on the corresponding SysML requirements.

SysML requirement -> Teamcenter requirement / requirement spec / paragraph

When a user drags a SysML requirement to Teamcenter in the Connection Manager of the Syndeia Dashboard, Syndeia dynamically looks up the rw_ tags in Teamcenter requirement-related stereotypes in the Syndeia profile and their values in the SysML requirement, and then sets those attributes values when generating Teamcenter requirement / requirement spec / paragraph items in Teamcenter. Once the Teamcenter items have been created, Syndeia gets values of their attributes (identified using the ro_ tags) and sets them in the SysML requirements.

Further, users can also create special types of Teamcenter requirements / specs / paragraphs by modifying the values of _item_type and _object_type tag values in the Teamcenter requirement-related stereotypes. The _item_type tag is set to the type of Teamcenter item (as defined using BMIDE) and the _object_type tag is set to the type of the corresponding Teamcenter item revision (as defined using BMIDE). By default, these are set to the base types of Teamcenter requirement / spec / paragraphs, e.g. Requirement and Requirement Revision for basic Teamcenter requirements. However, if an organization has defined special types of requirements using BMIDE, e.g. Business Requirement and Business Requirement Revision, then these values can be set in the _item_type and _object_type tag values in the Teamcenter requirement-related stereotypes. Next time, when a user attempts to generate a Teamcenter requirement from a SysML requirement, Syndeia will generate a Business Requirement and not the base Requirement in Teamcenter.

SysML requirement <-> Teamcenter requirement / requirement spec / paragraph

When a user invokes compare/sync operations on Syndeia connections between SysML requirements and Teamcenter requirements / requirement specs / paragraphs, Syndeia also performs a compare and sync on requirement-related attributes. It dynamically looks up the ro_ and rw_ tags on Teamcenter requirement-related stereotypes in the Syndeia profile and compares/syncs their values between the source end (SysML requirement) and target end (Teamcenter requirement / spec / paragraph) for each connection. For SysML -> Teamcenter sync, the values of rw_ tags are used to update the Teamcenter items. For Teamcenter -> SysML sync, the values of both ro_ and rw_ tags are used to update the SysML requirements.