What does the lifecycle state of a previous revision look like?

[Anonymous]

Hi, my company uses Vault (Pro 2013) but doesn't use any of the revisioning/change order/lifecycle features.  I'm considering implementing this (as well as upgrading to 2015) but I have a question about the revisioning process first.

I've figured out that standard functionality is that you can change the state on a Released file to Work In Progress and that will bump the revision.  My question is, what happens to the previous revision?  Is it automatically sent to Obsolete or does it remain Released?  Can it be sent to Obsolete if desired?

Related to this, what does the "State (Historical)" column show when using revisioning?  I'm assuming that whatever state the previous revision was in would be shown here in parentheses?  Can someone just post a screenshot demonstrating this?  I have looked high and low here, Google, Autodesk, YouTube, everywhere for some example of what happens to the previous revisions but to no avail.

I've attached a sample of what I'm looking for.

Thank you!

Joe Hendrickson

[brendan.henderson]

The previous revisions are retained. You can see them in the History tab (see my pic below). What you see in Vault is the latest revision. If you want to load up a previous revision you need to do a couple of selections. None of the previous revisions are Obsolete, their just historical.

[Neil_Cross]

And just in addition to the above, the difference between the two states is:

State = The current state that the file is in now, always the active state, this property isn't remembered/retained on old versions of a file.

State (Historical) = This is the lifecycle state a file was in at a point in the files history.  Version 4 could be Work in Progress, version 5 could be In Review, Version 6 could be Released etc etc.  It's a historical record of the lifecycle state.

Example below:

 

[Anonymous]

That's great, thank you Neil and Brendan.

So is it possible to change the state of a historical version, say to obsolete or something else?

Also, how do you know that a version is the most recent?  Is it because it is always at the top of the list, has the highest version number, and has a "State" associated with it (it looks like only the latest version has someting in the "State" column)?

Last question, so it would seem that the intent is that only the latest version would be in an obsolete state, meaning the item/part/file is obsolete and no further revisions should be made?

Joe Hendrickson

[Neil_Cross · Accepted solution]

No problem.

Historical revisions can't be edited or changed in any way, they serve as a documented history of a files lifecycle.  You can 'Get' the files out of the Vault as they were at the time of the historical revision as Vault will snapshot the state of the files at that time.  So say a file was Released at revision 1 whilst it was at version 10, this was a year ago.  Now the file is Work In Progress at revision 3 and currently version 24.  You can go into the history tab for that file, Get revision 1, and Vault with hand you version 10. Edit - if you ask Vault to hand you version 10, you can't edit version 10.  What you can do is take version 10 and then check it in to make it version 25, the now current latest version.

Yes the easiest way to find which version is the most recent is to enable the 'Version' column and order the history by that tab, therefore the highest version number will always be at the top of the list.  It's not as crucial to do that as you would think though, whenever you open a file from Vault or via CAD it will always retrieve the latest version by default anyway.  But for peace of mind you can order the history list by version number.

No you can't Obsolete an old historic revision number.  For all intents and purposes the old revision is obsolete by implication anyway, it's been superceded with a newer revision therefore the old revision is obsolete.  When you move a file to the provided lifecycle state named 'Obsolete' this will render the entire file as an obsolete product, all it's history will remain but it's current state will change to Obsolete.  Files can be moved out of an Obsolete state and back into WIP or Released, but that would normally be a transition for administrators only.

[Anonymous]

Okay, that's what I needed to know.  We are also using PLM 360 and I am trying to reconcile how the two systems deal with revisions/versions/lifecycles.  We don't have them tied together and I don't anticipate doing so but I'm re-evaluating our processes to accomodate the two systems.

Thanks again,

Joe Hendrickson