Support for circular references is a feature that impacts and of course must be implemented across all facets of Vault, but was primarily driven by our desire to have an accurate copy design output.
If you are not sure where you may find a circular reference, these are a natural bi-product of creating simplified models in Inventor, creating complex skeletal models or by simply referencing files in certain ways in AutoCAD.
Circular references can be confusing and, as you can well imagine, create problems with our Vault operations by creating an infinite loop (ties it back to title of the post) for us to work through when uploading or downloading references. In the past we simply cut the loop short and didn't display this in Vault, we now though capture and display the circular reference.
What does this mean? From a copy design perspective 2 things:
- You can see these references and configure to get correct outcomes with your simplified assemblies for instance
- You can expand your reference tree for hours and hours without ever getting to the end!
Please do not take number 2 as a challenge – eventually you will run out of screen real estate, time out the operation or go cross eyed – by design we limit how far down we automatically expand circular references, but you can keep manually expanding the uses tree if that seems like a good time.
For those of you looking for another kind of Copy Design related good time, please check out our next Vault Talk session focused on Vault Copy Design next month.
Please join us for this session at 12:30pm EST on Thursday the 8th of October 2015.
In this webinar, we will cover Autodesk Vault classes and activities at Autodesk University 2015, along with a close look at Copy Design.
Register for the session here.
See you then (Virtually)
-Allan
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