Item Circular Reference?!

[Neil_Cross]

Have an Item in VP2013, when clicking the 'Where Used' tab the client crashes every time and terminates.

I have a test server migrated to VP2015, when clicking the same Item 'Where Used' tab, I get the message shown in the image.  "Circular Reference Detected".

There is absolutely zero reference to this error anywhere on the internet so I doubt anyone will have any previous experience with it, but hopefully someone might have an idea.

Tried updating the Item, that doesn't help.  Tried checking the part out, the Item is just assigned to an IPT, checked that out and back in but doesn't help.

Kinda stuck with it now.

[minkd]

The circular dependency could be due to a parent and child (or grandchild, etc) having the same part number.

You may be able to get around it by temporarily turning off the auto-assign-first-duplicate in Tools>>Administration>>Vault Settings>>Items>>Configure settings for BOM rows during Assign Item. 

-Dave

[Neil_Cross]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the response.  In this case, no other Items or files in the Vault share the same part number.  I've done a full vault search on that part number and it only returned 1 file and 1 item, that being the one with the issue.

With regards to disabling the duplicate control, I'm not sure how that would affect this? The file is already assigned to the item, to the correct item, are you suggesting disabling that option then performing an update against the item? Still not sure what that will do as there are no other objects in Vault with that part number but I'll give it a try.

Thanks.

[minkd]

I'm not positive that the issue you are seeing is due to a duplicate part number - I only mentioned it because I have seen that error when that was the case.

You could also try setting the "Rows that will be turned ON during Assign Item:" to "None" so that when you update an item it does not traverse its children.  Then you could use the BOM tab to update children one at a time. This could help locate the offender.

Search won't necessarily find a file whose BOM has a duplicate part number since the part number in the BOM can be different that part number property of the file.  When assign/update item is done, the equivalence value (which by default has mappings from part-number) from the BOM is used.

-Dave

[Neil_Cross · Accepted solution]

Dave - sorry I didn't get back to you on this, I mustn't have had an email reminder or did and it got buried.

I just had another instance of a circular reference today when clicking an Item BOM, first day live on a 2015 system.

For anyone else who comes across this post, this might be useful info.

Clicking the Item BOM tab in the Vault Client results in:

Which isn't helpful as Vault Client then cannot display any BOM lines, and you can't troubleshoot it if you can't see the potential offending BOM lines.

However, you CAN see the BOM for this Item if you view the damaged item in the web/thin client.  That will let you see the BOM lines, if you then search for each BOM line in Vault client it'll then enable you to view each child BOM individually until you find the one with the circular reference.

In my case here today, it was caused by an assembly IAM referencing a child part with the same part number.  The item was corrupt somehow too, I fixed the CAD data but the item wouldn't update correctly.  I had to delete the Item and re-assign a new one from the files.

If you do this, obviously you've deleted the Item so you'll need to update parent items to retain the where used info.

A PITA but at least it's fixable.