topic Excel VBA to access CAD data within Vault in Vault Customization Forum

Excel VBA to access CAD data within Vault

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 17:12:18 GMT

I am new to an organization that is using Autodesk products, the CAD models are generated and stored in Vault.

My experience is with CATIA v5, and we developed spreadsheets that would extract meta data from the parts using VBA within MS Excel.

I've been told that meta data such as mass properties is available, and that several autodesk products have an API. Could someone point me to examples using VBA to run a script to expose the metadata of the CAD files?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Excel VBA to access CAD data within Vault

Markus.Koechl — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 13:49:15 GMT

Hi Gary,

welcome to the Autodesk community!

I am wondering what your workflow and objective are...

- Just to get an Excel table extracting metadata on file level as well as item level: there is a built-in function in Vault exporting metadata to Excel; include the properties in the view instead of programming. The command does the rest...

- Similarly, the reporting functionality allows exporting in formatted templates.

-To get the metadata within CAD, the BOM table shares it's data to Excel as well. Interactively or automated (iLogic automation).

To get started with each API reach out to each products' SDK; for Inventor, you find it in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Inventor 2018\SDK, for Vault Workgroup and Professional in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Vault Professional 2018\SDK. Documentation and Samples should help to get started.

Re: Excel VBA to access CAD data within Vault

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 15:37:02 GMT

First off, thank you for the response.

My inquiry is about using VBA within MS Excel to pull the data instead of using the Exporting feature within Vault. I'm trying to address a need where only a few people have access to Vault, but everyone has access to MS Excel tools in house. The intention is to create a generic read only username within the tool to pull data for use in other in-house tools.

I have several tools that I would like to integrate, and having to go to vault to then export is a touch labor, training, and access step I'm trying to eliminate.

If you have more guidance, please let me know. Much of the resources I've found require MS Visual Studio, and I'm looking explicitly for VBA experience to integrate with MS Office products' backend and not require licensing for development products.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Excel VBA to access CAD data within Vault

jeremye86 — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 18:49:41 GMT

i would like to know the same