How does the vault store drawings on the server?

[patrick.quigley]

All,

I am trying to correlate drawings in the vault (Vault Professional 2012) with a physical file on the server (buried within the ...000\000\000\000\000... folder structure).  I am not too familiar with the vault but I am assuming that the vault drawings and the correspoding physical file mapping is stored in a SQL table.  Is anyone able to get me started in the right direction on how I can do this?  Please keep in mind that I am only interested in the files on the server, not on the engineers local machine.

Thanks,

[swalton]

I don't think that Autodesk exposes that mapping to anything outside of vault. 

What are you tring to do?

I would bet that the way to retrive any files from vault is for humans to use the vault client/CAD product and for other software to use the vault API. 

[patrick.quigley]

Thanks for the quick reply!

The products that we make are 100% custom.  All of our jobs will have multiple items that are designed and manufactured/facricated - a lot of them in the same day.  In order to keep our production pace we have had to hire on temps to print all the engineering drawings to all the jobs that we are releasing to production.  Doing that will allow our shop floor to know what to build and how to build it.  If there was a way to pull those drawings out automatically we could reduce our overhead costs (the temps), decrease delay in moving jobs from engineering to the shop, and potentially increase our output from the shop floor.  There are multiple advantages in our organization for doing this.

Thanks again,

[swalton]

We had our reseller write some software to achieve this.  It uses Vault APIs to retrieve files and information from vault.  There is also a component that creates the pdfs, stps, and dxf files that runs in Inventor.