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Brian Schanen joined Autodesk in 2005 as a Product Designer and currently is a Customer Success Engineer for Autodesk’s Data Management products. Brian has taught at Autodesk University numerous times and has authored white papers on Vault and Productstream. He works with customers to implement a complete digital prototyping solution specializing in Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Vault and Productstream. Brian lives near Detroit, Michigan.
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Leading Wildcard Search in Vault and Productstream
January 29, 2009 07:15 AMby Brian SchanenFor those customers that leveraged leading wildcard searches in the 2008 and prior releases of Vault and Productstream, a solution has been posted. The hotfix listed below addresses using a leading wildcard as part of a search in Vault or Productstream 2009.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=12268454&linkID=9242499
Note that this hotfix also covers a number of other issues including Content Center databases and the ADMS (Autodesk Data Management Console).
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Property Writeback from Productstream to Microsoft Word
January 21, 2009 07:46 PMby Brian SchanenAs Vault and Productstream are for more than just CAD, users can not only check in Microsoft Office files, but write back Properties into the file. The following steps will take you through property configuration in Ms Word and Productstream. Our example uses Office 2007 and Productstream 2009.
In Word, click the Office Button>Prepare>Properties.
Populate the property that you want to write back to or create a custom one by clicking the Document Properties down arrow, then Advanced Properties.
In this example, we create a property called “PWB” and give it a default value.
Go to the Autodesk Vault Toolbar (Ribbon in Office 2007), Log in to Vault and check the document into Vault. From the Tools pull down menu, click Administration>Properties.
As the PWB Custom property is populated it will be indexed. Locate the property and see that it’s “State” is marked as not In Use, and Basic Search is “Not Searched”.
Whilst the property is selected, Click Edit and change “State” to “In Use”, and “Basic Search” to “Searched”.
Exit the “Property Definition” dialogue box. You will see a message about performing a Re-Index. Take the time to log into the ADMS and re-index this Vault database to expose this new property.
In Vault Explorer, locate the file and Customize the View to show the Custom “PWB” property. See that the cell has the value entered earlier.
Next, In Tools>Administration click Items. Then Properties. This opens the Item Property Wizard.
Create a new Item property called “doc_prop”, Ensure the Data Type is the same as that in the doc, in this example “Text”. Select:
- “Display On Item” = “Yes”
- “Data Source” = “Item”
Click OK to exit. Then click “Mapping”>“From Item To File”, Find the Property Name “PWB”, Click Add. Select the “doc_prop” Item Property and click Add. Then OK, and Close.
Next “Assign Item” on the Document and go to Item Master to find it. Right Click and Edit the Item. In the Properties area, notice that our new property exists and you can select the “Value” and enter some text. (NOTE: If we had set the Data Source as File, we could not edit this field).
When you have entered your text, Click “Save and Close”. If you still have the document open from before you might need to click the “Refresh Status” button to enable the “Update Property” in the Autodesk Vault toolbar. Alternatively, delete the local copy and use “Open From Vault”.
When prompted Check the file out by clicking “Yes” or “Yes to All”. Remember, you can set this to be an automatic and silent prompt.
When prompted you should click “Yes” to update the files property from the Item. Check to see that the property has indeed been updated.
Finally to complete the round trip, check this file back in to Vault and see that the PWB File Property has been updated - from Productstream!
Thanks to Richard for this helpful tip!
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Moving Files Linked to Released Items
January 14, 2009 10:28 PMby Brian SchanenWhen a project is finished and you need to clean up the Vaulted folder hierarchy , sometimes you would like to use the Move command. However, when you try to move the files to another folder you receive a message as follows:
Move Files (s)One or more files cannot be moved. See details for more information.Restriction = Cannot move locked files.
The reason for this is that when an Item is released, by default, the file linked to it is locked and uneditable. The Vault Status icon reflects by superimposing a padlock symbol to represent that the file is locked.
This behaviour is controlled the following selected option. “Enforce File Locking per Lifecycle State”.
To be able to work around this, it is possible to select the file and unlock it from the pull down menus. File>File Control>Unlock.
This should be done with care and if the file you try to move is used in another file the move operation will be blocked and you will receive the following message.
Move File(s) Cannot update file references of one or more file. Select the details button for more information.Restriction = One or more of the parents of <filename> is either locked or checked out.
You will need to unlock the parent file and all other referenced files as well to complete the operation. Once the move operation has been concluded you will need to lock the files again manually. For this reason it is worth making a note of the files unlocked to move files so that they can be locked again after the operation. This can be done either by printing or saving the list of files.
Thanks to Richard for this helpful hint!
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Create your own custom Revision Scheme in Productstream
January 5, 2009 09:04 PMby Brian SchanenThis week we will concentrate on creation of a custom Revision scheme for Productstream Items. Autodesk Productstream ships with several Revision schemes out-of-the-box. These include an Alpha, Numeric, and ASME Y 14.35M which is Alpha minus the letters I, O, Q, S, X and Z. An administrator can also choose to create a custom company-specific rev scheme to match existing revision rules.
In the following example, we’ll create a numeric revision scheme. In this example, there will be no initial dash, and the rev format will begin with zero. An easy way to start is with MS Excel, as you can easily build a large sequence quickly as in the following image.
The next step is to save this out to a txt file to be imported later to Productstream. Opening the txt reveals a list of values that will be the sequence of revisions in Productstream.
Next, open Productstream. From the Tools menu, select Administration>Items tab. In the Lifecycles and Revisions area, click the Sequence button.
In the Revision Sequence dialog, click the ‘New’ button, then the … browse button and choose the txt file. Enter a name for this sequence, choose a delimiter for secondary and tertiary revisions, and click OK.
With these modifications, you can view the new sequence from the drop down. Then, preview the new revision scheme sequence and an example is listed in the bottom half of the dialog box.