Is there a way to keep our old drawings' history when transitioning to a new workflow and vault-controlled revisions?

[Aristos_ANDROUTSOS]

Hello everyone,

First let me try to explain our situation:

We recently upgraded to vault and inventor 2024. Up until now, the drafting team has been working without a correct workflow setup. All files have been left in wip state and it has been like that for years. With the opportunity of the upgrade, I thought it would be a good idea to implement a correct (to our processes) workflow and set up permissions and automated PDFs and DXFs.

The upgrade is now done and there are more hiccups than I initially imagined, but we are slowly working through them. However, one major issue that we are having is this:

1. The old drawings (any drawings created before the completion of the upgrade) have an inventor revision table. This means that we immediately lose any history as soon as we open them again, because the revision table is replaced with the vault revision table. Is there a way to keep this history and not lose it?

2. The representative from our IT/Autodesk company said that we would be able to use vault's change revision option in order to maintain the latest revision. He said all we had to do was to go there and to use User Defined P Rev Number. That did not work at all. After some investigating, I found that for whatever reason, while that property exists on the inventor side of things, vault knows nothing about it and it's blank, which also results in a loss of history.

The only "solution" I have found so far is to check the revision number of each drawing and then manually set that same number as the revision in vault (through the change revision option). This still results in a full loss of our history on each drawing, but keeps the number. I then manually re-enter that revision's comments (taken from the PDF) and that's it. Curiously, on drawings that had many revisions, any hidden revision rows remain in the drawing and can still be seen when the revision table is edited. The revision number still starts from scratch though.

Any help or guidance is greatly appreciated!

[Gabriel_Watson]

Would it work to segregate older files, by creating a new Category (and probably Lifecycle to match it) for all of those, and having no revision associated with it? That way, at least in my mind, I believe those older files would be left alone, and new files can leverage the revision scheme.
Tools > Administration > Vault settings > Behaviors > Categories > pick File Categories > in Behaviors section, Revisions tab, set to "None" as default.

[ihayesjr]

@Aristos_ANDROUTSOS 

1. The old drawings (any drawings created before the completion of the upgrade) have an inventor revision table. This means that we immediately lose any history as soon as we open them again, because the revision table is replaced with the vault revision table. Is there a way to keep this history and not lose it?

Look at the solution in this forum thread. Solved: Copy Revision table contents to Custom Table - Autodesk Community - Inventor

Then you can start using the Vault Revision table for the new workflows.

2. The representative from our IT/Autodesk company said that we would be able to use vault's change revision option in order to maintain the latest revision. He said all we had to do was to go there and to use User Defined P Rev Number. That did not work at all. After some investigating, I found that for whatever reason, while that property exists on the inventor side of things, vault knows nothing about it and it's blank, which also results in a loss of history.

It sounds like you did not map the Vault Revision property to the Inventor iProperty.

[Aristos_ANDROUTSOS]

@ihayesjr Thanks for your reply! 

What you are saying makes a lot of sense. However, I went into the vault settings to check and my understanding is that the property is indeed linked, which makes me even more confused now. Can you perhaps see anything wrong with the screenshot below?

Edit:

I had a look on the user defined properties of a file in vault and it seems that Rev Number is missing (see screenshot below), most likely indicating that the property is indeed not linked, as you stated. The question then is, what have we done wrong in the screenshot above?

[Aristos_ANDROUTSOS]

@Gabriel_Watson Thanks for your reply!

This is a great suggestion and you are correct with what you say about the revisions, but I don't think it will work for us. The requirement is to transition all files to the new workflow, not keep the old ones in a separate one. I think that we will try to at least keep the latest revision through vault's change revision option, once I figure out why it doesn't work for us.

[ihayesjr · Accepted solution]

@Aristos_ANDROUTSOS 

The "Rev Number" is not the Vault "Revision" number. Take a look at my image in the previous post.

The "Revision" property is a system property coming from Vault. So when you have a Vault revision, the "Revision" property needs to be mapped to the files "Rev Number" property.

You can add the "Rev Number" to the category your model files are assigned so that you can see the "Rev Number" property and value in the Properties Grid.