troubles with custom properties in Vault

[wkoehn]

Hi,

I am new to working with custom properties in Vault. We are using Vault Basic with Inventor, all 2014.

My trouble is I set up a custom property and used it and am now unable to delete it. When I get usage counts under EDIT PROPERTIES it shows (1). I thought I would be able to find where it was used by searching Vault where this property : is not empty but it returns no results. This same query works correctly on other custom properties. Any ideas where it could be used and how to find it?

[cbenner]

Are there any mappings associated with this property?  It's very difficult to guess where it could be in use.

[wkoehn]

[cbenner]

Try editing the property and removing the mapping.  Then see if you can delete it.

[wkoehn]

It just tries to tell me I must have at least one mapping...

[thomas.rossmeisl]

Hi wkoehn,

if you want to find out where the property is used, then you can use the Find feature of vault.

Press CTRL+F to open the Find dialogue and in there you can define a search like:

Look For: Any

Property: SEAL KIT

Condition: contains

Value: *

The reason why your "is not empty" search failed is probably because the property is empty. But this doesn't mean it isn't used.

This should return a list of objects on which the property is used.

[wkoehn]

OK that works better. Now my search returns 13555 results which means that my custom property got applied differently than I intended I guess...

Thanks!

[thomas.rossmeisl · Accepted solution]

Ah sorry my fault. I haven't really thought this through. This statement returns every File.

But you can try one more thing. In the options tab of the find dialogue remove the tick for "Find latest versions only". And then look for "is not empty".

Maybe your property is used in an older version of a file.

[wkoehn]

^^ Perfect! Found an earlier version of the file that was using this property. Once I purged that version the property was able to be deleted. Thanks!