Operational Flows

To illustrate the relationship between Altium 365 Generic PLM Connector endpoints and the overall flow of the basic operations, this section presents the simplified flow of operations available using the Generic Connector API. It excludes more complicated scenarios, but unless your IsOperationSupported() method returns true for those queries, Altium 365 will not start those operations and will be limited to the operations presented in the following section.

Sync Operation

To PLM

Sync to PLM starts with verifying Auth data. If the Generic Connector accepts the Auth data, the Sync process begins. First, it reads all the metadata types. Then, based on connector configuration, Altium 365 will query its internal data store to select items that need to be synced. When the list of components that need to be synced to PLM is ready, the process will start fetching the items from PLM (based on the configured key). If the item does not exist on PLM, it will be created. If it does exist, it will be updated. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

To Altium

Sync to PLM starts with verifying Auth data. If the Generic Connector accepts the Auth data, the Sync process begins. First, it reads all the metadata types. Then, based on connector configuration, Altium 365 will query PLM for a list of item IDs that need to be synced. For each of these IDs, the process will fetch the items from PLM (based on the configuration) and store them on the Altium side. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

Part Choices

To PLM

The Part Choice operation is run at the end of the Sync Operation. It consists of reading items from the PLM side and then running CreateItems or UpdateItems operations. What is worth noticing is the format in which Part Choices are provided. For every Part Choice entry, Manufacturer Name and Manufacturer Part Number attributes configured in Attribute Definition configuration row will contain the Part Choice data.

Number of Part Choices that can be passed, is determined by the number of Attribute Definition rows in the configuration. If only three rows are added to the PLM Integration config, up to three Part Choices will be provided (each occupying parameters from a single row of the configuration). Any additional Part Choice will be ignored.

Publish BOM

Publishing BOM starts with verifying Auth data. If the Generic Connector accepts the Auth data, the Sync process begins. First, it reads all the metadata types. It will then read from PLM all items that are present in the BOM. Based on the response, it will create missing items (such as project file, components that were not returned by ReadItems, etc,) and request creation of a BOM type relationship between the project and the items. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

Publish Project

Project Publishing starts with verifying Auth data. If the Generic Connector accepts the Auth data, the Sync process begins. First, it reads all the metadata types. Then, Altium 365 lists all components that exist in the project and tries to read them from the Generic Connector side. It is worth mentioning that the project itself is also threaded as an item. Based on the result, it will either create or update items. When the sync finishes, Altium 365 will start uploading the relationship information. To do so, when needed, it will upload a file as an attachment and later run the CreateRelationships command that will refer to the uploaded file. An example of such files is *.pcba assembly file. The number and type of the files depends on the publish template configuration. When the CreateRelationships operation finishes, the basic publish operation is over. If PropagateChangeOrderToNextStep would be configured on Altium 365 and CustomPLMService supported operations such as CreateChangeOrder, the AdvanceWorkflowState operation would also begin.