Confused about "Not the Expected Revision"

[Anonymous]

Despite working with Vault Professional for a few years, I don't fully understand what is meant by "Not the Expected Revision" or more importantly, how it should affect my decision making. I do understand that "Not the Expected Revision" means that a child reference is newer than what was previously being consumed; however, I am not sure exactly what to do with this information.

I have tried extensively to understand this through my own testing, documentation and this newsgroup but have now reached I point where I need to reach out for assistance as I am still puzzled.

To have some context for my questions, let's suppose I have an Inventor assembly which consumes an Inventor part and both files are checked in and Released at Revision 1. Subsequent to this, the part file is re-released as Revision 2. When the Inventor assembly is opened up using latest, "Not the Expected Revision" will be displayed beside the part file. Given this scenario, here are my questions;

1) If I want the assembly to consume the part at Revision 2, is it necessary for me to put the assembly back into WIP, checkout/in and then re-release?

2) If the answer to question 1 is Yes, then my big question is "why?". If a file is revising, it is an improvement to the design and it should not be necessary to checkout/in (and possibly revision bump) all the parent files to consume this improvement. This becomes tedious and very time consuming especially if the file that is displaying as "Not the Expected Revision" is very deep within the file structure (e.g IAM references IAM which references IAM which references IAM which references the IPT in question) as you must now tediously work your up the chain to consume the revised child to the top of your project/design. Given that a revised file is an improvement, why doesn't vault just consume the new revision?

Sidenote: From my very limited testing with Item records, changes to child items appear to be automatically consumed (right behaviour IMO) but with files, this doesn't appear to happen thus forcing the checkout/in to consume. Why one behaviour for items and another for files. I have only worked very briefly with items so perhaps I am wrong on their behaviour.

3) Why is it necessary to open up the files in Inventor to determine which children have been revised? Why can this information not be displayed in the "Uses" tab of Vault Explorer?

I am really hoping that the experts out there can help me get to the bottom of this confusion.

Thanks!

Ross

[ChSchmidt]

Hi,

1) Yes

2) A released state of an assembly reflects the released revision and state of every component in an assembly at the time it was released. If you change a part then this is a new combination of revisions and states in the assembly, which needs a revision of the assembly.

In most cases newer can be better, but you can't differentiate between the assembly with file in older revision and assembly with file in newer revision if you don't revise the assembly. How e.g. would you then know what you have buildt and delivered to a customer?

Best Regards

Chris