Autodesk Vault

[#1]

This is probably a very basic question, but those are always the tough ones to find answers.  New to Inventor/Vault, not new to CAD/PDM.  Vault Basic, 2013.  Making a whole bunch of new parts, but as far as I can tell, there's no good way to know what you've made unless you keep a list to the side.  Am I missing something?  How do I know what I need to check in when I want to check it all in?  Thanks!

fyi: I am making my parts from within Inventor first and saving to my work location on the HDD, is that my process problem? In the PTC Intralink days you would build within your "workspace" so you always knew what you had made and what needed to be checked in, but I don't really see that as a method with Vault Basic.

--Scott

[#2]

If you have installed Vault Add-in with Inventor, you can new a Vault project in Inventor, so that the file can be managed by Vaut. After that, while you work with your design, there will be a Vault brower, which can help you understand which files have been checked in and which are not. Meanwhile, if you try to close the file without checkin, there will be a message to remender you to check the design back to Vault, so you will not forget to upload your design to the server.

Hope this is helpful.

Thanks,

-Frank

[#3]

Yes, helpful that I didn't know I could change the tree on the left to show the Vault.  What I am finding is that if I make a new file from within Inventor though, it does not always ask me to check in.  And, what if I don't want to check in at this time, perhaps I have more edits to make and such, so checking in extra times in undesirable.  

Looks like the more advanced Vault has some sort of comparison tool, but looks like that was completely overlooked (or someone decided that it was "good marketing" to leave out that feature to force us to upgrade to fancier unecessary version)  in the Vault Basic.  

Geez, already getting on my soapbox in my 2nd post, sorry folks.

--Scott

[#4]

In a multi-user envirnment the work flow can (usually?) looks like this;

1. Statart a new file

2. Save new file in Vault workspace on you HD with appropriate name

3. Check blank file in leaving checked out to you.

4. Do creation type stuff

This prevents multiple people from trying to create the exact same part or any confusion on the file names. it would also take care of the asking to check in issue.

As far as showing what is up to date between your hard drive and Vault, that functionality is in Vault Basic.

[#5]

Vault (basic) does not manage the workspace like Intralink/Windchill.  It only tracks files that have been added to the Vault server.  Anything else, it ignores.

Autodesk has not provided a tool to find any files in a workspace that are not in vault.  I bet it is possible to write a utility that compares the list of files in a directory structure and the list of all files in vault: I have not done so.  It might take a while to run, my workspace has 15k files in it.  This is after running the workspace sync tool.

If you can perform a search with Windows to find all files that are not read only, that may give you the info that you need.