Friday September 30, 2011 at 2:52pm
For customers moving to EnterprisePDM from an unmanaged environment the question of how best to add legacy projects which share common files to the vault can be a tricky one. You don’t want to create duplicate copies of shared parts, yet you may not be migrating all your data at once.
A nice enhancement in EPDM 2011 was the ability to ‘Update Broken File References’ when adding data to the Vault. This allows us to make use of a simple process when dragging a set of files into the vault, minus the common parts for semi-automatically updating the references to the common files already added to the vault. Any files not previously added to the Vault and in a known location on the users file system can also be selectively added to the Vault or replaced with another file in a controlled manner.
In the movie attached to this post you will see how I add and repair an Assembly that references files previously copied into the vault and structured within a “Library Parts” folder structure.
The demonstration shows the following process.
- Drag your files into the required location within the Vault
- Select the Top Level Assembly to check it in and note the ‘missing files’
- With the Assembly still selected, choose ‘Update references’ from the ‘Tools’ menu
- Click ‘Find Files’ and browse to the ‘Library’ folder inside which I want to search for files with the same name.
- Most of the missing files are found, but one which isn’t I can then ‘Replace’ and ‘Add to the Vault’ placing it in a Library folder also.
- Once all the References are updated I can then apply the changes and check in the Assembly with all its references.
Thanks for your time....
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Wayne Marshall | PDM Support Manager