Vault 2013 Compound Category Rules

[Anonymous]

I am currently in the process of creating my file category rules for Vault 2013 Professional and I have run into a bit of a snag. I would like to assign the category based on the Created By property using a list of users to include. However it seems that the category rules do not allow for OR statements within the values like the search function does. The statement that I am trying to create is "Created By - Contains - dmills4 or chernandez4 or ect..." but it will not accept more than a single value. At this point, the only way I can see to achieve the desired effect is to state all of the users I don't want the rule to include. However I work for a large corporation and we acquire new personnel all the time. If any of these new persons should be excluded from the rule it will have to updated which seems quite inefficient. Has anybody had a similar experience and a possible solution? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[thomas.rossmeisl]

Hello Daniel,

I'm affraid this is not possible. But it could be possible to find another way. You could create a new property, that contains the creator's vault group and use the group the determine the category. This approach reduces the administrative overhead, because you don't have to add new users all the time.

Would this be an acceptable approach for you?

[Anonymous]

Thomas,

When you say Vault Group, do you mean the creator's permission group? If so we have multiple permission groups for our users at our facility. Would this be a manually filled property or can I automate the population of the property? If I can automate the population, how do I determine which group to populate the property with if the user belongs to multiple permission groups?

Is there any way to add the "Path" property to the rule condition builder or is there a different property that I can use based on where in the Vault Structure the drawing is stored?

[thomas.rossmeisl]

I think your approach is impossible without at least some form of additional programming. You have to caputre the group at some point or write it manually into the property. Also it would be up to you to decide what happens, when a user is in different groups. With datastandard it would be easy, but this option isn't available in Vault 2013. 

What are your desired categories and why do you want them set based on creator? Please explain what you ultimately want to achieve. Maybe there is a better tool to achieve  your goal than the categories.

The Path property is not available everywhere but you can access it through the vault api.

[Anonymous]

As I stated in my original post, we have multiple facilities within the same Vault. The workflows and properties are different at each facility. In order to control the file lifecycles at my facility I would like to have a drawing category specific to our facility and would prefer for drawings to be automatically assigned to this category upon check-in. I am also using the Classification tool within the enterprise add-ons to control the required properties based on this "Ocala Drawing" category. I am able to achieve the desired workflow using a rules that exclude all of the users that are not at our facility, but I was just wondering if there was a way that I can do the reverse so it would be easier to maintain.

[tmoney2007]

Are you using inventor or Autocad or a mix?

We have a small ilogic script in inventor that prompts the user once a day to select which design group they are working for (we have 4 in our vault), this is written into an iproperty in Vault that can be used for File Category assignment.

It wouldn't help for autocad but it works for inventor. I'd imagine it could be replicated in Autocad as well. You could modify it to look up the value in a spreadsheet based on the current username on a computer and automatically enter it.

[Anonymous]

I think I am going to add a property to the templates we use at my facility to include a design group property populated with our facility location which will fix all future files. To fix the existing files I will run a report in Vault and populate the property using the enterprise add-on. Thank you both for your suggestions.

[mikel_martin]

You can not do this in a single rule.

However, if you keep in mind that the rules are evaulated in order and once a match is found no further rules are evaluated, it does become an OR statement if you use two rules.

Instead of this;

• If Prop1 = X OR Y then Category = Cat1
• If Prop1 = A OR B then Category = Cat2

You can do this;

• If Prop1 = X then Category = Cat1
• If Prop1 = Y then Category = Cat1
• If Prop1 = A then Category = Cat2
• If Prop1 = B then Category = Cat2

I beleive it will give you the same result.

[Anonymous]

Mikel,

I appreciate your input and it would be a great solution if we only have a few users. However we have 32 users at our facility, so each category would require 32 rules (one for each user). Also, there is other property criteria in the rule, so if I had to make a change to this criteria it would require me making the same change in each rule.

[mikel_martin]

With that many users, you are correct, maintaining the rule set would be a nightmare.

I think the suggestion of adding a property to the template would be the simplest way to acheive your goal.

However, this will not help you with data created externally that needs to be added to the vault as well.