IGES 'solid' export bug ?

I am a developer at a CAM company, in charge of importing various
files into our format. As such, i see alot of iges files. Some
versions of pro/e seem to produce invalid IGES files. Specifically,
when you ask pro/e to export a solid, the IGES brep entity (type 186)
is supposed to have an outer shell as it's first entity. In some
cases that i have seen, the brep entity points to itself (as the outer
shell). For example, here is a line from a pro/e generated IGES file:
186,4609,1,0; 4609P 4708


the 1st 4609 says that the entity 4609P should be the outer shell, but
4609 is the brep entity!
Anyone heard of this problem? (my customer says that version 20, 21
and wildfire all do this...) Is there an export option to
control/change this behavior?

This probably makes no sense to most of you, but is there an pro-e
developer that reads this newsgroup? or, any place to get free
support from pro/E? i have seen some good solids from Pro/E IGES, so
there must be something i'm missing, or a version that does it
correctly, or???

thanks
bd

 

I don't know much about the technicalities of IGES files, but I do know that
many of the machine shops I send parts to cannot read IGES exported as a
solid, but can read IGES exported as surfaces.

Dave