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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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Here is one for the Admins
August 22, 2008, 09:56 PM Brian SchanenThis post is directed at the Vault and Productstream Administrators. In other words, those of you who are responsible for the fidelity of Vault – and you know who you are.
Populating the Vault with CAD data has been a concern for managers and administrators. There are several recommended ways, and in the past when end user strayed from these, there were undesirable consequences. In the 2009 release, an option is one by default with either a new or migrated Vault, that blocks manual Check In or “drag and drop” of CAD files to Vault. Find this under Tools>Administration>Files tab.
Attempting to add an Inventor file for instance, the user is met with a warning. The only option here is to close the dialog box. There is no workaround at this stage – even for a Vault Administrator account.
As the message states, you should use the appropriate application to add the files. This means Inventor, Autoloader, or Task Scheduler. Only through these applications can relationships be maintained. But what happens if this is switched off? Next let’s examine what happens if you uncheck the option in the Administration dialog box and “drag and drop” Inventor files into Vault. Remember, this is for demonstration purposes only…
I have unchecked the option for the next steps. As I drag and drop a folder of Inventor files into Vault, I am again met with a message. Note the hint about using the Inventor add-in and lost relationships. But you can continue by clicking yes. And that’s when the badness can occur.
Examining the results, initially we see that there are in fact no relationships between files. This IDW is adjacent to its IPT child, yet unaware of the dependency.
Furthermore, files that should have classifications like iPart factories and members are not displayed correctly. The iPart in the following image should have a different icon and tooltip.
Finally, one of the more painful side effects is missing DWF’s. These are not generated unless the files are Checked In through the appropriate application (hint hint).
So, why would anyone need to uncheck that option? Should it be left on full time? One use case is to populate the Vault with Template files. If you place your Inventor templates in a Vault folder, you may elect to add them manually. These are not intended to hold any file relationships, and a DWF is optional. I suggest keeping this on during all production work hours. It’s a nice option that give additional peace of mind that your data is accurate both in Vault and when retrieved.
The Vault Knows All...
-Brian Schanen
Comments
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April 24, 2009 11:54 AM Byron Black
Brian, Your posting seems to imply that there is a command in Inventor that allows designers to add new files to the vault directly from Inventor (as opposed to dragging and dropping them from Windows Explorer). I am using Inventor/Vault 2008 and I cannot find such a tool/command, even though the Vault Add-In is loaded. The vault add-in seems to only allow me to manage files that have already been added to vault. Perhaps this why I see the symptom noted above where my IDW files do not show the associated IPT file in the "Uses" display. I am doing a pilot for our company to determine if the PROS of using vault outweigh the CONS of data migration. The problem with the IDW/IPT files not associating themselves is likely to kill the deal... Byron Black
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