Excel Program to Open Drawings From Vault

[Lauren_healey]

I am writing an Excel program to run through a list of drawing numbers and retrieve information contained in those drawings. This information is contained as Sketched Symbols in these drawings. I assume the first step would be to locate the drawing in Vault and open it, but I'm not sure how to write an Excel program in VBA to do that. I am also wondering if I will have to install SDK first to write such a program?

[Nick_Hall]

Hi Lauren

That's not impossible using Excel VBA, but it is tough. This is a rough outline.

• You would have to create a COM-enabled DLL to access the Vault API, as described here - https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/vault-customization-forum/reading-vault-files-properties-inside-excel...
• Using the interface to this DLL, locate the files you want, and download them to your local disk
• Use the Inventor API from VBA to open each drawing, find the relevant sketched symbols, extract the data and write it back to Excel

None of the above steps is easy individually; combining them is not for the faint-hearted.

I would approach it differently, using PowerShell to access Vault, Excel and Inventor. This would be easier to implement and more stable.

The PowerShell script would need to:

• Connect to Vault
• Open the Excel file and read in the list of drawings
• Loop through the drawings, and
  • Locate the drawing in Vault
  • Download it to the local disk
  • Open it in Inventor
  • Use the Inventor API to find the sketched symbols
  • Write the data back to Excel
• Save the Excel file

There are examples of using PowerShell to connect to Vault & Inventor in these forums, and to Excel in places like StackOverflow.

If this raises any questions, just ask

Hope this helps

Nick

[Markus.Koechl]

I suggested an alternative approach, as the major process is an Inventor task: use iLogic. It provides built-in Excel interaction, and the iLogic-Vault capabilities share all the methods needed to search, download, and open drawings from Vault.