Read attributes from all blocks in drawings

[hbc85]

Hi.

I'm new to vault and working on a transition over to vault from a self made way for my company.

I'm testing vault basic right now as i can't get them to pay for professional without knowing this can work.

I'm trying to figure out how to get our meta data in vault.

We do all our 3D work in AutoCad. So a transition to inventor is also something i am working on.

But in the transition period and to even convince my team that this can be right for us.

I need some things checked out first.

And one of them is our data. Sense its all in AutoCad today inside xdata and our project management system. I have made a lisp program that extract that data and post it in blocks. The block get the name from its object name as its the 3Dsolid i make a block of. So we get that object name over to inventor. I am trying to figure out if i can use vault to read the object info from the AutoCad file and some how connect it to the part file from inventor?

As i can not get inventor to read the connected attribute data either. 

But for what i can see i can only read predefined named blocks. And that wont work in an environment where i need data from object blocks.

Does anyone know how i might get this done as it should be done?

My other step after i start populating vault is to extract out to our project management system. And it needs to extract inn to vault as well. But that's not a problem i am looking at, at this moment as i cant get our data inn to vault at this moment. 

[Markus.Koechl]

Thank you for the detailed context; it helps to understand the primary and secondary questions better. Vault Block Indexing (what you figured out and named "predefined" blocks) targets drawing title blocks. Reading any block definition of drawings is a valid wish and a challenge to handle the unforeseeable variety of block definitions and attributes.

If I had to resolve your task, I would have converted the xdata to AutoCAD Mechanical (ACM) part references and their attributes. Vault Professional has an integration to read/write part refs and bill of materials (an option to aggregate part refs within an ACM drawing) to/from Vault Item Master. In the future, if you convert these AutoCAD blocks to Inventor 3D models, a common Item will reference both files as they carry the same part number.

[hbc85]

We are using normal AutoCad with an inhouse application. Its this inhouse application that makes it so hard for them to move on beyond AutoCad for 3D taskes. So there is no ACM function built for us i think. 

Also. I see i miss spoke in my first post. I said "my company" i ofc mean the company i work for. 

I am just someone trying to move us forward and want it to be as pain free as possible. hehe

[hbc85]

Another question. Is it possible to program inn via c# that during check in to choose blocks to read blocks from a file?

I see the check inn prosses has a selecter of a sort. Can this be made to read attributes as well? 

[Markus.Koechl]

You can write a check-in event handler to leverage pre- or post-event interactions. Theoretically, you could write an extension to scan your drawing for any block and read its attributes; if I recall your context correctly, each solid's metadata is not stored as block attributes. So, these metadata reflect more an item/component with metadata than drawing properties? If so, where would you think to store the extracted information? Are you planning to extract these data as Vault Items and build an Item BOM? If you tend to confirm my questions, I will return to my initial approach to leverage the AutoCAD Mechanical Toolset. I understand you are not using it right now, but it might be an option to use its BOM migration wizard to extract text tables or Excel spreadsheets to AutoCAD Mechanical BOM tables. Vault reads these BOM tables as part of the check-in process and extracts Items/BOMs for each drawing. My suggested strategy is to evaluate existing tools for migration first before writing code for a rather complex process.