Equivalence error

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am looking for some help here to a problem that we can't seem to solve. A few months ago we implemented the lifecycle and revision control for Vault 2013. After many small issues we have finally got this working smoothly. All except for one problem. When we change the state of an autocad file we end up with a non equivalence error for the revision property. We have the system property "Revision" mapped to a custom property in autocad. The error is telling me that these are not equivalent. The system property is driving the rev field in the vault revision table and we are using the other property to drive the revision field in our drawing template. When this occurs the rev table updates but the drawing revision field does not. If I open the file, check it out, and hit update properties, then the revision field in the drawing updates and when I check it back in my error goes away. This tells me that the mapping works. Not really what we want to do every time. Here is the strange part though. Usually any properties that are out of sync can be updated within the vault by choosing "synchronize properties". For all of our Inventor files this works. For the autocad files that I am having issues with this only works on 2 out of 10 machines. So there are 2 people here that can get the properties to sync from the vault. The rest of us just get a screen telling us that the property did not update due to an unsuspected error. Everyone is running very similar computers, windows 7, vault, inventor, autocad mech, autocad electrical, etc.. I have spent a lot of time trying to find what the differences are on those two machines then the rest of ours and I have had no luck. I have ruled out things such as user permissions (one is admin other is document editor and manager level 2). I have checked service packs, file associations, vault configuration files (we modified these to make the job processor update the rev blocks), and many other things. Although I have found slight variations between people's machines I have also found that the two machines that can synchronize these properties are the most different from each other than from others. I have pretty much run out of ideas and our software provider has pretty much stopped answering my emails. I have done countless internet searches and have not found much on this topic besides a company offering software that they claim fixes this. The description on their web page says that this is a windows thing that can be caused by many different things. Not sure what to believe but this is making me question whether or not I should have our IT guy completely wipe out someone's machine, reinstall windows, and then reinstall the autodesk software. I have tried to do a repair and also a reinstall on one machine without any luck. Has anyone had any issues like this? Again, this is only for .dwg files. All of the inventor files work properly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

KMC

[Neil_Cross]

Hey, don't panic... the property mappings and management in Vault really do take some getting used to.  But first things first, under no circumstances go to a company who claim to fix this... this isn't something that requires any third party software at all.

Just to clairfy, so we're talking about the same thing can you confirm this is a non-compliant property issue? You're seeing the little tag symbol with the red dot on it?

I'll assume so as it very much sounds like it.  And sorry if I'm stating stuff here that you may already know...

If what you're saying is correct, some PCs can correctly synchronise the properties in Vault and some can't? That suggests your mappings are correct and properties are correctly assigned to the relevant document categories.  If there's only a couple of PCs which aren't doing this, that points the finger towards client side issues rather than Vault/configuration issues.

Apologies if you already understand this part, but just for clarity it's perfectly 100% normal to get the non-compliant property flag when you up-rev a file in Vault, in fact it's confirmation that your mappings are indeed set up correctly.  What happens is, for example, when you bump the Vault revision to 1... immediately you've caused a mis-match between what Vault says the file is and what the actual CAD property is.  Right now, Vault is flagging revision 1 but the file still has the character '0' in the property.  That's all a non-compliant property is.  It's perfectly normal.

There's a number of ways to take it from there.  Like you mentioned, the CAD application will sync the properties on check-out, that'll modify the CAD property to be '1' and therefore it's no longer non-compliant. 

You can also use 'Sync Properties' in the Vault, which you said you've done... but a couple of PCs aren't playing ball on that?

Lastly, and this is the way I build Vaults, I have an automated sync properties job trigger on lifecycle state change which is then processed by the job processor.  The job processor will be told to sync the properties of any files which have recently been up-issued, that's if they haven't been checked out before it has a chance to do it.

So, back to your issues... were you more concerned with the presence of the non-compliance flag or the fact that a couple of PCs don't seem to be able to correctly sync them? Because from what you've mentioned, everything seems in order other than those PCs.

[Anonymous]

Neil,

Thank you for your response. My main concern is that we currently only have 2 machines that are able to synchronize properties on .dwg files. They are both on designer’s machines and not anyone within the document control group has this ability. Let me give you a little more information. We have our lifecycle set so after a designer completes their work they check their file into vault. The vault setting puts all ipt, iam, idw, and dwg files into the engineering category. Our main lifecycle (we have a different one for library parts) puts these files into Work In Progress and starts the revision at Z1. We use Z1 as our preliminary starting rev until the file is released. This way the initial release is A. So after someone checks their file in to establish a connection with the vault, they check it back out and update vault properties from within inventor. This populates the rev block with vault data such as date, drawn by, revision and eco number. The bottom corner of the drawing has a revision field which is part of our company template. We use a custom property called LIFECYCLE REV. This is mapped to the system revision property. After the user updates the file he then sends it back to the vault and sends it to the job server for DWF creation. The Job server (we have 7 running) will synchronize properties, update the revision block, and create the DWF. The user will now change the state of these drawings to review. At this step we require the user to make sure that they filled in all fields that we have added to the data card. Properties such as description, fabricated or purchased, vendor info, etc... If they don’t do this then we have it set so a non compliancy will keep the user from being able to change the state. What ended up happening initially was we were finding that the engineers and designers were not filling in the information that they were supposed to. Then the document control person had to do this. So once the file is in review it goes through the review process. If changes are required the document control person changes it back to WIP and notifies the designer that the file is now unlocked and ready for changes. When the file goes from review to WIP we have the secondary revision bump. Our z1 now becomes z1.1. We have this transition set so that the files synchronizes properties, updates the rev block, and creates the DWF all by the job servers. In most cases this works. Especially for the inventor files. Occasionally a property will not update which throws the red tag indicating that there is a non compliancy. On all machines and in all cases for inventor files we can just hit the synchronize properties command in vault and this will go away. Now you mentioned that changing the state in itself causes the non compliancy. I do understand what you are saying. When we initially change the state in the vault the non compliancy will pop up while the file is being processed by the JP. Once that is complete (we constantly check the Queue) then  we will hit refresh and the NC will go away. Back on the lifecyle. The user would now make changes, update the drawing, and put it back in review. If the file is approved then our document control person now enters in a name in the approved by field and changes the state to released. This transition also sends the file to the JP for sync, rev table update, and dwf creation. After a few minutes the file is updated and the rev block, template, and all other property fields on the drawing are correct. What used to take hours for a designer to do is now done in a few minutes. We no longer have to open all of these files in inventor and manually update the rev blocks. During this implementation we even imbedded I logic code into the drawing file so that our document control person can open the file and upon closing it generate a PDF and STP file for our purchasing department. This also works fantastic. Now back to the problem. What is happening now is a designer will create a schematic or label drawing using autocad. When they check it is everything is fine. When the state changes to review everything is fine. If the state changes back to WIP then the rev field in the table updates but the one on the drawing (mapped to LIFECYCLE REV) does not update. This is where I get the equivalence error. On 2 out of 10 machines the user can hit the synch properties command and this will automatically update by the vault. The rest of us have to check the file out, hit update vault properties, and check the file back in. If we do nothing then we can't change the state because this is a non compliancy. So now if the file is in review and gets released this also happens. We have a DWF file in the vault that has two revs on the print that are not the same. Now we have to have an administrator check out the file or put it in quick change and synch the properties to fix this.

More information: I have modified two vault configuration files on all the machines that have the job processors running. The two files JobProcessor.exe.config and Connectivity.VaultPro.exe.config. The modifications basically just made the rev table and synch properties update during check in. We also sped up the time so that our files only sit in the queue for one minute before one of the 7 JP’s pick them up. This stuff also works fine.

I have always suspected that this is a windows thing but I just don't know how to fix it. Here is another interesting piece of information. We used to have 3 machines that could do this. We lost one when the user had an issue with his vault add in not loading in excel. Another guy here unloaded the vault addins for the office files and then reloaded them. After that this person's machine could no longer synchronize properties. Not sure what happened behind the scenes on this one.

This has been a long road to get to where we are. we still get a bunch of errors in the queue on a daily basis. Some we are not sure why, others because users try to check out and check back in files while they are still in the queue. We can work around most of these. If we could get the .dwg files to synch on all machines then I think everyone here would be happy. Any information or suggestions you may have will be highly appreciated.

Thanks,

KMC

[Anonymous]

I am posting this in case someone else has this same issue in the future. After quite a few wasted hours I finally discovered that the problem I was having was caused by service pack 1 update 2. One of the guys who were able to sync properties had actually downloaded hot fix 2. When you check in Vault to see what version you are running it does not mention that there is a hot fix installed. It gave the same build number. On one computer I uninstalled all of the service packs and I noticed that without any service packs I could sync properties on autocad drawings. I installed service pack 1 update 1 and still had no issues. I then installed service pack 1 update 2 and my problem came back. I then installed hot fix 3 and the problem went away. I have now installed hot fix 3 on everyone's machine and we no longer have that issue. Now I can focus my time on trying to figure out why all of a sudden I cannot export an IDW to DWG from Inventor.

KMC

[Mark.Lancaster]

To add to your reply...  What Vault version is your server at now?  It is recommend that the server and clients always be at the same build #..   I also recommend that you put a plan in place and inform your users not to install Vault service packs or hot fixes unless instructed...

 I've seen this a few times where the client and server is out of sync when it comes to Vault updates and things just get broken...