Search files with no parents

[andymeek1621]

Does anyone know of a method for searching for files that do not have parents (in find).

During design process a lot of parts and mainly bolted connections are created in model, then deleted.

I have a feeling this could stretch to the thousands so would like to find all files that are not used in vault.

[derek.gasch]

Did you ever find a solution for this?

[FProcp]

Lately I've been creating a large amount of piping with Inventor Tube & Pipe.

Sometimes I'll delete a pipe run then re-create it.

That leaves lots of bits of pipe that are in already in Vault and are no longer needed.

Pipe parts that now have no parents.

I need a way to search for all of them and remove them.

If I could find them all I would put them up for adoption or something .

In my Vault they are just taking up space, and I want them out.

If only I could find them all. There's got to be a way?

[mikel_martin]

There is currently no method to locate all the orphaned parts in Vault.

Knowing if a part is currently being used or not, may not be as useful as you might think. You can not delete the part if is being used by a historical versions of an assembly. Unless you delete or purge the version of the assembly referencing the part you can not remove the part.

That being said, the information is there, and it would be possible to use the API to find this information.

However, it would not be a search scenario. For something to be done via a search it must first be indexed. This can only happen for information that is static relative to a given version. However, the parents of any given version is dynamic relative the version of the child. In other words; I can change what is referencing a part without needing to version the part.

So, it is not possible to have a search do this. But it might be possible to create a program that would crawl the Vault and find files that are not being used and then create a report. However, the report could have stale information by the time you see it, because any given part can gain or lose parents dynamically.

[FProcp]

I would like very much to be able to find them.

Then I could decide if I wanted to purge and delete or if I wanted to move them all to a different folder.

I must have hundreds of pipes in my Vault from deleted Tube & Pipe runs that are just wasting space.