Vault 2014 Revisioning in Drawings - input?

[david.penney00]

We have been using Vault (Collaboration and now Professional) since 2009. We recently updated our Autodesk Suites and Vault Client/Sever to 2014.

We have set up the client for our latest revisioning scheme and our latest lifecycle scheme, and all is working great it seems - across the board.

However, we now seem to have two major issues that we didn't have previously. Possibly from something we have missed on this set-up:

Firstly, on revising the drawing in Vault (after first check-in), now when utilising Tools | Synchronising Properties, it no longer inserts the initial revision character into the usual Title Block of the drawing....

Secondly, drawing thumbnails for Preview are not being produced of the drawings after checking into Vault....

What settings are we missing for this? Anybody any ideas? Anything specific to check for?

Cheers

David Penney

Lead Mechanical Designer

[olearya]

HI David,

1) you will need to check that the mapping is set up correctly in the properties admin section so that the system property "Revision" maps to the file - something you may want to consider though is adding the default revision value to your templates so that you do not need to carry out this step every time a file is added to Vault.

2) are you finding that the thumbnails are missing for all files added from all machines? 

[david.penney00]

As we are "rebuilding" the design office between full projects, we are initially re-setting up my machine, and once everything is working OK, will set up all Suites and Vault clients on all other machines - prior to starting out next project.

So all new Project Study drawings have been added via my machine utilising Plant Design Suite 2014 and Vault Pro 2014.

Cheers

DP

[david.penney00]

OK...."mapping" under Property Definitions, seems to have worked. Thanks for that suggestion!

However, that now leaves the intelligent (as in can be measured and so on) thumbnail issue. or lack of, I should say.

What are the settings for correct production of (any) Thumbnails for all drawings?

Cheers

David

[olearya]

Hi David,

Sorry for the late reply, thumbnails are indexed from the local machine, not created by Vault, so this could be an issue with your local CAD install - do you see thumbnails OK on the local PC?

[david.penney00]

My apologies, but I should have left a message before leaving late last night, however I eventually worked out during the day, through a lot of article reading and trial and error, how to set up the CAD software to achieve the production of "thumbnails" when checking in drawings.

Having said that, I really feel the Vault documentation and WikiHelp doesn't cover the setting up very well overall. Its one thing to state what the dialog boxes are, its another to know what to actually do with them....some sample screenshot set-ups examples would have been very beneficial I think.

Having said that, I do now get the thumbnails as required, but now I get a yellow triangle warning as follows.....

Warning: This visualisation file is not a sytem controlled visualisation file. Use Update View.

I can't find "Update View" anywhere, so I can again only assume it means the "Update..." button.

On clicking this I get the following message.....

"Visualisation file cannot be be created for '012-.....-0003.dwg' due to vault restrictions."

The Restriction is stated as "No layouts to publish".

This drawing has in fact 4 layouts (sheets) to it. It has 4 thumbnail pages also.

So a bit confused right now....that I do get the thumbnails, but I also get a warning about them?

Cheers

David

[olearya]

Hi David,

Good feedback on the help system, we are continuing to tweak this and look at more visual means transfer knowledge.  

In terms of the viz file warning, this simply indicates the dwf was created on check in so there is a possibility that something in that view is not appearing correctly as it is no longer latest version.  You are not really required to update the view unless you really believe that the view is out of date and you can in fact switch this warning off in viz settings.

In terms of the update error - this seems a little odd as clearly the visualization file has been created previously, you may need to do some testing with your visualization settings as well and check out / check in of the affected file - I am starting to wonder if there is not some issue with the install of your CAD products.

[david.penney00]

Do you mean the Product Design Suite itself may have a problem?

I can always do an uninstall and re-install I suppose of the Suite - as it is only my machine that has been fully set up so far to ensure install/settings are OK, before setting up all the other machines...

Cheers

David

[olearya]

Hi David,

It may be worth doing a repair - but before we go that far are there any other symptoms?  Do the file icons appear correctly in explorer?  Are you able to create dwf files from the CAD add ins OK?

[david.penney00]

"Do the file icons appear correctly in explorer?"

That would definitely be a yes.

"Are you able to create dwf files from the CAD add ins OK?"

Not sure by what you mean with "CAD add ins"....but the creation of the DWF files when checking in the drawing works a treat.

Regards

David