Beware of Implicit Checkout | The PLM Dojo http://plmdojo.com/nx-int/beware-implicit-checkout/#.Xo2zbG...

Beware of Implicit Checkout | The PLM

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by Scott in NX Integration

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“…And another thing, what’s up with NX checking parts out without being
asked?” Mike paused to take another swig, “Somehow I’ll be able to save changes
to a part without intending to, what’s up with that?”
It was a typical wild and crazy night at The Dojo — a couple of engineers hanging
out, drinking beer and talking about Teamcenter and NX.

What Mike had run into is one of my pet peeves with the NX integration with
Teamcenter: you can’t prevent NX from checking parts out for you.

The Integration is Too Nice

Mike had been reviewing an assembly that a team of designers had been working
on. He tried out some design changes. He didn’t intend to save any changes so he
didn’t check any of them out.

Mike’s done a lot of design work himself. He learned the hard way to save his
parts often. A summer thunderstorm, a tree branch falling on a powerline, and
suddenly a day’s work is lost. His fingers know how to hit control-S to save
without any direction from his conscious brain. And that’s probably what he did,
because suddenly his changes had been saved to the database even though he
had never checked anything out.

Background
In order to save a change to a part you need two things:

1. Write permissions granted by the Access Rule Tree.

2. The part needs to be checked out to you.

Many people may have write access to the same part, but only one person can
have it checked out at a time.

Explicit and Implicit Checkout

There are two ways to check a part out: explicitly and implicitly.

An explicit check out is one that you manually do yourself. In NX you can right-
click on a part in the Assembly Navigator (ANT) and check it out. You have to
make a somewhat conscious decision to do that.

Implicit Checkout is one that NX does for you. It saves you the trouble of doing
an explicit checkout. Implicit checkout is silent. There won’t be any message
telling you that you have checked out the part. The problem is that sometimes

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NX will check out a part to you that you have no intention of checking out. That
is what happened to Mike.

Manual-Schmanual Locking Policy

Right about now some of you reading this are screaming, “MANUAL LOCKING
POLICY!!!” at your monitor. I have two things to say to you,

1. Cut it out. You’re scaring your coworkers.

2. It doesn’t do what you think it does.

Yes, there is a setting in the customer defaults to set the locking policy to
“manual” and yes it does prevent NX from implicitly checking out the file… for a
while.

Here’s the thing though,

if you try to save a NX file that you do not have checked out…

…and you have write access to the part…

…NX will check out the part to you.

Even. If. The. Locking. Policy. Is. “Manual”.

When you hit save NX will check the part out, save, and then check it back in. All
automatically. You can try this yourself and verify what happened by looking at
the check out history.

What to do?
For a long term solution I’ve filed an ER about this. I invite you to do the same.
Personally I think this behavior should be changed so that you can force users to
explicitly check out a part in order to change it. Perhaps the Access rule tree
could be modified to control who can check parts out.

But in the short term what we do is change our access rules so that only the
owner of a part has write access to a part. In effect, ownership replaces Check-
in/Check-out. Users rarely explicitly check parts in or out. The only time the deal
with it much is when a part failed to implicitly check in for some reason and
someone else needs to work on it.

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It kind of works, but it’s not perfect by any means. Having to manually re-assign
objects as work is moved around the group has its own set of problems.

Your Thoughts?
I’m curious what everyone else thinks of this. Do you see this as a problem or
not? Have you found a solution that I’ve missed?

Update: TC_Auto_Checkout (is not the answer)

I received an email that reminded me of a Teamcenter preferences I had
forgotten to mention, TC_Auto_Checkout. At first it sounds promising because the
doucmentation says that it, “Enables or suppresses automatic implicit check
out…”, which is just what I want. But documentation then goes on to say, “…of
non-NX datasets”. It doesn’t do anything for NX datasets.

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