Attribute Concept

Attributes are additional information which can be attached to some entities of the API. For example, attributes can be attached to products and their geometries, or attributes can be attached to calculation jobs (see Attributes).

There are three types of attributes expressing different intents

  • design intent attributes

  • process attributes

  • technical attributes

1. Types of Attributes

1.1. Design intent attributes

Design intent attributes are the most important attributes since they express the intent of the designer of the product to manufacture. Design intent attributes are available for product geometries (see API documentation ).

Examples:

High-quality edge attribute (0b7f3394-7c62-4f6b-aa83-d5e148096f65) to specify that a segment should be optimized for high-quality (e. g. since it is visible to the customer).

Processing type attribute (69d9ec8e-6bb4-441b-af21-6c2a51a88c6b) to specify that a curve should be marked instead of cut.

1.2. Process attributes

Process attributes express the intent of the operator for producing a product. These attributes are primarily available for calculation jobs (see Nesting Sheet Program Jobs API documentation, Sheet Program Jobs API documentation ).

Examples:

Process Reliability (2e21e3d0-6b37-40d8-a6a6-7332866703f3), Quality (87b14663-02f5-4dd9-8c4c-a3b43047dd9f), Cost Efficienty (9f18647d-2f14-4ac4-b387-010aae9741fa) attributes to express the focus of the operator on process reliability vs. quality vs. cost efficiency. Depending on the weight of the attributes, the calculation is optimizing for a different target. For a night-shift, the operator may want to optimize for process reliability to ensure that there are no incidences during the night-shift.

1.3. Technical attributes

Technical attributes allow experts and programming systems to express their requirements. Technical attributes require high technical background and strongly guide or even over-rule the technical decisions made during the calculation of an optimum NC program to match the intents of the designer and operator.

If technical attributes are required to guide the calculation, the reasons why are of high interest for us to improve the design or process attributes. Please let us know, what technical attributes you would like to have available.

Examples:

Preferred Approaching Position (cf19d6e5-2634-4cb2-b329-aa1c7a353fb1) to strongly advice the calculation to take a given position for start cutting a contour.

Microjoints allowed (16b14da6-054c-445d-b9da-e635b1504897) to allow or disallow the application of microjoints to prevent collisions.

2. Derived Job Attributes and Characteristics

In the calculation, we try to make technical decisions depending on the design and process intents attached as attributes to a calculation request. Some of these decisions are returned as attributes within the Characteristics document referred by the characteristicsUrl in the state reply (see i.e. Sheet Program Jobs API documentation ). The Characteristics document shall provide the reasoning behind decisions of the calculation and contains for now all attributes derived from the input, such as material and attributes (primary Process Reliability, Quality, Cost Efficienty).

The documentation of the Characteristics document can be found in the API documentation.

All attributes returned in the Characteristics document can be adapted and passed as job attributes within another calculation request for recalculation of the same request with adapted technical decisions.