How to initially check in a lot of assemblies and parts (Inventor)

[mechamania]

Hi,

I have a lot of Inventor projects with assemblies and parts. Not all parts are part of an assembly.

I just started to use the Vault. How can I easily add all these assemblies and parts to the Vault?

As far as I can see you have to open an assembly and then you can add it with all its parts to the Vault.

But I have a lot of assemblies and not all parts are part of an assembly. I have a lot of parts that are like alternatives for the parts in an assembly, so they are not part of any assembly yet.

How can I ad all of this to the Vault without opening all the assemblies and parts individually?

Also, when I do add the assemblies manually (which I hope I do not have to do), how can I see which part are not added yet (to add them manually)?

[gandhey]

Hello,

You can use Autoloader to load all your Inventor data to Vault, without opening individual assembly files etc. This is installed with Vault client.

Please check if this helps.

Regards,

Yogeshwar Gandhe

(Autodesk - Vault team)

[mechamania]

Thanks

I tried the Autoloader. But without success.

First of all, I can not find a way to filter out files I do not want to check in. Like .bmp and .pdf etc.

(I just would like to add only the .ipt .iam and .idw files)

Second, I got different errors.

- I have missing files. for instance a missing .fres file. This is a simulation file and I do not want to add anyway.

- I have missing Content Center Files. Don't know yet why they are missing

- I have a duplicate file. But the duplicate is located in a folder that I did not select for data source. (file is also raported as missing!)

[tmoney2007]

You have to clean your data before you put it into vault. You have no choice in the matter. You can temporarily hide the files you don't want to load from the user doing the loading and that should keep them from being loaded.

The only alternative is to work with Autodesk Consulting with their load tool that can get around some of these issues, but then you'll just have bad, broken data in your vault.

Coming from someone at a company that had almost 2 million files loaded into our vault... go through the pain of fixing the data if it is important enough to have in the vault.

Additional tip, Autoloader only likes to deal with files in chunks of about 5000, so split it up into multiple loads.

[mechamania]

Please do not understand me wrong. I also would like to have a clean checkin. But there are problems I do not know how to solve.

First there is the missing .fres (and other simulation) files. I do not want to check them in anyway. So how to exclude them and avoid this error?

Second the duplicate part that is at a location outside the folder I selected for data source. How to deal with that?

[tmoney2007]

For the simulation files, I think you'll have to go into each one and break the link (its usually in the "third party" folder in the model browser (unless you can figure out a way to automate that.

For the things that are outside the folder for the data source, you'll have to move the files into your data source and rereference to the new location.

I agree with you that Autoloader could use a fair bit of work, but it is what it is right now and given that more advanced loading is something that Autodesk offers as a service, I wouldn't expect alot of additional features to be added.

[swalton]

Inventor automatically creates a link between the FEA model and the FEA results. Vault will want to grab the results files each time you check-in a FEA model.

You can turn it off by going to the simulation settings and un-checking the "Create OLE Link to Result Files". See my attached screenshot.  If you do this, IV will store the FEA setup in the base model file and leave the results in your workspace.  If anyone else downloads the base model into their workspace, they will have to re-run the FEA simulation to see the results.

You will have to do this for each new FEA model you start with Inventor.  You can also go through your old models and uncheck this option prior to using Autoloader.

As to your files that are duplicates or in the wrong location, you get to fix them by moving them to the correct location or by opening any file that references them and fixing it so it uses the correct resource. 

You can also try to set up a project file that sees all of your files everywhere.  Use that to upload into Vault and use the Vault tools to clean up your depenencies.  This will still be manual work checking files in and out of Vault, but at least you have the "Where Used" and "Uses" tabs, plus easy drag-n-drop to move and fix files.

I would be tempted to create a test Vault that I used to get all my data cleaned up.  Once that is done, I would do a pack-n-go, keeping folder structure, to my production workspace and upload the clean data to my production Vault.  That way I minimize the the extra versions and file history in my production vault.  This will also give you somewhere to play with vault features without wrecking your production environment.

[tmoney2007]

Good idea, creating the second vault to use for cleanup. Of the groups at my company that loaded their files, the ones that did this were the most successful.