Mapping problem: Converting text field to date field

[Anonymous]

Hi,

We've recently installed Inventor 11 and vault workgroup. During the transition period we will we using both ACAD and Inventor. All our ACAD drawings have a few custom properties, one of these is 'approval date'. This corresponds with the vault property 'checked date'. I've set the mapping to 'synchronise' (double headed arrow) and the create option to 'yes'.

These settings work for inventor drawings but not for the acad drawings. I think this happens because the Vault 'checked date' field is a date field, and the acad 'approval date' is a text field. As far as I know acad only supports text fields.

How do I fix this/is there a work-around?

Thanks in advance.

[luttena]

Hello. Thank you for posting the issue.

As for the property mappings, the Vault server will convert the property value to text before it writes it to the AutoCAD file so that is likely not the issue here. Is it possible you have conflicting mappings to this property? In other words, make sure there are no other properties that are writing to the ACAD property. To do this, view the Vault property 'checked date' and select the ACAD mapping to 'approval date'. With that mapping selected, select the 'Where Used' button to see if anything else is mapped to that property.

If there are multiple mappings, then it's possible that another property is taking priority over the 'checked date'.

I hope that's clear. Let us know what you find.

Regards,

Adam

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the quick and clear response. 

The vault indeed converts the date to text, so when the vault field is leading everything works just fine.

However everybody here is used to filling in the checked fields in the drawing, and not in the vault. Furthermore we have several thousand 'old' acad drawings that have a 'approved date' field filled. I tried checking in one of those but (as expected) the vault maps its empty date field over the filled drawing date field, thus losing the property. 

When I change the mapping settings and make the file leading, check in an old drawing and synchronise properties I get the message:

"Failed to read from file property 'Approved Date(Custom)': Data type conversion may be the cause"

hence my suggestion it could be a conversion problem 😛

The ideal situation would be: 

-new acad drawing

1 a user can fill in the checked by and checked date fields either in the drawing or in the vault

2 upon checking-in or property-syncing the vault detects what field has the most recent entry and overwrites the old one.

-old acad drawing

1 temporarily change the mapping settings and make the file leading

2 check in all old drawings and have the vault take over all the custom fields

is this possible?

Regards,

[dave_deane]

Where you able to set this up to behave the way you described above? The user can fill the date property in the drawing or in the data card.

Dave