In a specification, you collect items from your material library that satisfy certain criteria. For example, you can have material (idents) with all dimensions that are mentioned by the ANSI-standard in your material library. However, in a single specification, you only want to allow access to a limited range of nominal sizes and schedules. You can use specification filters on your idents to achieve this limited range. The following screens pertain to specifications:
The S.50.06 Specification Management screen contains:
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the specification header definition with the filter rules on the header level. This specification header is called geometrics.
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the specification line items and its related data plus a filter rule for each line item.
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the idents that remain in the specification after the filtering process.
There are three basic filtering mechanisms that can be applied:
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Filtering by nominal sizes
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Filtering by schedule table
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Filtering by branch table
The spec filtering mechanism is the basis of a function in Smart Materials called FIND_IDENT. This function can be called to find idents with the following information:
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Which specification is the material in?
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Which short code is assigned to the item?
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Which option is desired?
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What are the sizes of the item?
FIND_IDENT will look up the spec for the appropriate information and return an ident according to the spec filtering mechanism. However, in some cases, find_ident can find idents that are not "directly" in the spec. Refer to the chapter that deals with FIND_IDENT for more information.