Vault and iParts – Category Assignment

If you’ve been following the odyssey of Vault and iPart posts on Lifecycles and Revisions, this next section is critical in automating the behaviors of your standard Inventor configuration files. Within Vault, the almighty Category defines exactly how a file behaves in Vault. This dictates the Lifecycle definition, which in turn dictates the Lifecycle states available, which dictates the security on those files, which ultimately makes using iParts with Vault palatable and prevents the frenzy of save after save (we’ll cover this in the workflow section). Categories also define which Rev scheme to use, along with Property assignments, etc. But how do we get these configurations to trigger appropriately in Vault?

The good news is that Vault will assign Categories based on a rule generator. So, here are the clues to proper Configuration Category assignment:

On the behaviors tab under Tools>Administration>Vault Settings, click the Rules button. Provided you’ve created Categories for Configuration Members and Factories, click the New button on the top bar. Enter a Rule name called Factory, and choose the Factory Rule from the pull down. Repeat the same step for Configuration Members.

Next, select the rule for Factories. In the lower half of the window is the Rule Condition Builder. This allows you to leverage a number of Properties in the system: Indexed, User Defined, and intrinsic. From the Property pull down, select Classification, Condition Is, and Value = Configuration Member. Ensure that the Apply rules on file creation box is checked, and click OK. Repeat for the Member rule, Classification Is Configuration Member.

Finally, select the rules you’ve created for Factories and Member, and move them to the top of the list using the arrows. Why?  The rules engine works from top to bottom, and it stops once a rule is satisfied. Remember that iParts and iAssemblies have file extensions of .ipt and .iam respectively, so if you have other Category Rules that trigger off these file extensions, you’ll want to ‘catch’ the configurations first.

Stay tuned, and we’ll outline workflows and categorization strategies.

-Brian Schanen