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Good day fellow Vault-ers. Today’s tip is for power users and admins that find themselves in the following scenario: You have your files categorized, lifecycled, under revision, all is well except you decide to track an additional Property in Vault. This might be one you’ve wanted to add, got lost in the deployment, just showed up as custom properties, or perhaps you’ve read a blog post about how to do it and want to make sure this new Property is displayed on every file in a given category. Let’s take a look at a sample set of User Defined Properties I have in my demo Vault below. Note that I have the vertical Property Grid displayed, and the System props are collapsed, leaving the list of UDP’s.
Notice that the Property ‘Vendor’ is missing? With 2011, that’s ok, and remember Properties don’t just show up without asking for them to. So next we’ll have to stroll into Property Manager to turn this on and verify mapping.
For this example I target an iProperty that comes with every Inventor file, yet lies dormant until we wake it up. Finding the Vendor UDP, i double click to edit and first ensure that it’s applied to all of my File Categories. Good. Now switch over to the Mapping tab.
Note that Vault comes pre-defined with many of the Inventor iProps already somewhat mapped. But this time we’re going to make a slight change. The way the above image is configured, IF there is a property in the Vendor field, it will go as a one way street into Vault. We’re going to change that to make it bidirectional. This gives us the ability to either populate it whilst in Inventor or edit/add it from Vault.
Change the Create option to Yes and click ok, close all windows.
It’s time to apply this new property to a select group of files. One way to get this new property to appear is to check out/ check in the files. And while all new files in that category will get this property applied, we have a better way to achieve this rather than a mass check out. Highlight the files and go to the Actions pull down menu. Click ‘Add or Remove Property.
The next window lists all available Properties. In the action column, click to expose the drop down carrot and Add the new property, in this case I am targeting Vendor. Click OK and close the dialog box.
Finally, verify that the Vendor field (bottom) is displayed in the Property Grid. In my example, I still have all the files selected (explains the *Varies* value) and the new property is exposed. This example used iProperties from Inventor, but this will work with AutoCAD fields/custom properties, attributes, and MS Office custom properties as well.
-Brian Schanen
