Last week, we had the pleasure of a visit from Chris Cassettari, a pre-sales engineer at DriveWorks. Chris flew to Syracuse from Manchester, England to educate and refresh our team on what DriveWorks has to offer. The week was spent going through DriveWorks Solo and Professional training, certifications, and installations.
Here are our favorite lessons from our visit from Chris:
1. “My favorite feature was using Child Specifications to enhance my form design and project capabilities inside DriveWorks Professional. Child Specifications work like Item Lists; except that instead of launching a single form for each row in a list, a complete DriveWorks Project (the Child) is launched. By using Child Specifications, I can control different flows internal to a project while keeping my information organized at the top level. This can be accomplished because data can be passed between the Child and Parent using Constants and Variables in the respective projects. For the example below, I was able to pass the Order Number from the Quote System (Parent) to the Door Form (Child) without needing to enter the data again. Conversely, I was able to generate a complete door specification in my child form and pass it back up to the Quote System by adding it to my Contract Items Child Specification. This meant I could build a bill of materials without needing an overly complicated Form Navigation.”
– Tom DiLaura, Syracuse, NY
2. “The best thing I learned this week was how to apply Specification Flows. Coming from the EPDM world, I like the fact that I can put a work flow into DriveWorks and provide specific permissions to different users. Creating different states, transitions, and triggered events allow me to add new levels of control into my project. The example below shows a sales work flow that gets engineering approval for a quote and automatically generates SOLIDWORKS models to fit the quote configuration, a quote document, and an email that sends an eDrawing and quote to customer automatically after approval. Seeing this background information really helped me understand the power that comes with DriveWorks Pro.”
– Scott Blackwell, Rochester, NY
3. “My favorite lesson came from exploring the interface and not actually from the training book. Once I had completed the training, I asked Chris about Specification Macros and he showed me how to create and edit a macro to be used inside user forms. I was able to apply a Specification Macro to a Macro Button on my user form by using rules to pass my macro parameters. This allowed my options to dynamically highlight as a user hovered or clicked on my form. As I continued to dig into the software, Chris let me know that there was another option for writing macros by using the DriveWorks Software Development Kit. Luckily, the SDK is available to DriveWorks Resellers, but it also available to DriveWorks Pro Customers who have an active subscription support contract. Below is the screen from DriveWorks Administrator on my first attempt to create a Specification Macro.”
- Andrew Law, Rochester, NY
