CATIA V5 Tutorial: How to Customize Product Structure Nodes

By default in a Product structure, CATIA displays Product Number for the Top level Product and for sub products, Product Number and instance Name are displayed. CATIA gives a wide variety of options to customize this Product Structure Node. You can specify Description, Definition, Instance name, etc to be displayed in the Specification tree.

How to Customize Product Structure Nodes (Specification Tree) in CATIA V5

1. Go to Tools –> Options
2. Click on “Product Structure” in the “Infrastructure” category.
3. Click on “Nodes Customization” tab.

4. Here all the display options are listed. Check the Customized display box for desired category and click on “Configure” button. For example we will configure “Product instance, reference loaded”.
In the configure customized display window, check the desired value. The changes can be seen in the name box. In our example we have checked in Description. Note that you have to delete the text in the name field manually while checking in the options ON and OFF. CATIA doesn’t automatically remove previously unchecked values.

In our example, Specification tree now includes Description (Refer image below).

How to change the number of Characters displayed in Specification Tree?

In case of large product having hundreds of Products, the screen becomes cluttered due to long Product Number and Instance name. To avoid such problems, you can customize Tree Item Size Characters.
1. Go to Tools –> Options
2. Select Display Options in General category
3. Click on Tree Appearance tab
4. By default Tree Item Size is set to Text-dependent. Change the radio button to Fixed and type in the number of characters (refer image below).

5. Click OK. Now CATIA will display names with number of characters you have specified in the specification tree.