Pro/E with Mathcad (part 2)

Following the last post on this topic and more testing, I'm moving towards a particular method of working with Mathcad >> Pro/E.  You'll notice the arrow goes just one way now: and I reckon that's the most robust way to work.  I was hopeful the Mathcad Analysis Feature would be suitable, but it's just not good enough yet.  It's buggy and slow, and I've decided to use a neutral file for transfer of design parameters...

See the pen diagrams for details (easier to draw than explain!) - but basically the Analysis feature often falls over when changes are made to the Pro/E model and/or Mathcad worksheet.  In development this is no use, as things change frequently till you get what you want.  I demonstrated the falling-over to PTC staff, so they can communicate back to base + hopefully improve in future.

So, the plan is to have users work direct in Mathcad (it's a nicer interface anyway) - then push the numbers to a text file - then read into Pro/E.  The text > Pro/E bit is familiar territory, since we already run a web generator with this transfer method.  When you do a Pro/E regen > read file, it takes up any sizes recognised and ignores the rest... so you can easily resize a properly-set-up template file to suit your new design.

It also feels better keeping Mathcad and Pro/E apart at this stage... you get the benefits of each without any complication between them.  They are each excellent tools in their own right, but getting the official integration to a stage that will do them justice is probably years off... so meantime the text file transfer will do me.  More details will probably follow in a Part 3 post.