It's All Just Ones and Zeros

Vault Data Standard - Themes Support

Autodesk Vault 2023 Clients introduced an updated themed user interface. As a user, I can select the Light (default install), Dark, or the legacy Classic theme for Vault Explorer. The CAD addins, like Vault for AutoCAD or Inventor, adopt the parent application's theme, Dark or Light.

Vault Data Standard (VDS) fully supports themes starting with the 2023 Update 2 as a minimum release version. The default configuration of Update 2 renewed all dialogs and data sheets.

Now - there is the question, how can your customized VDS configuration benefit from these new capabilities? Unfortunately, this question is rarely asked :(. Instead, I see forum posts, support requests, and emails asking, "We updated to Vault Professional 2023, and now all Data Standard dialogs are broken!" 

If your custom dialogs (migrated from earlier Vault releases) miss the title bar, pull-down menus, or even more, you must update the style section of your dialogs and data sheets. Acknowledged - this is unexpected work. But I can guarantee that you will like the result and the simplification if you have tried before to make your dialogs stylish.

I put together step-by-step instructions on updating your customized files: Autodesk Vault Data Standard 2023 - Updates and Migration. If you are familiar with VDS but less with "Themes" and "Styles," start reading the crash course first. Experienced configuration administrators will benefit from tips, deriving themed messaging, and more.

I hope you enjoy it!

- Markus

New Content for Autodesk Vault Professional

Hello everyone. My name is Markus Koechl.

I am a  Sr. Solutions Engineer in the Autodesk EMEA Technical Sales organization. You might have seen my name in the Vault customization forum, Autodesk Knowledge Network (AKN), and AU classes or even accessed my public GitHub repository for Vault sample applications.

This blog got silent for the past few years as Doug's role changed and new content spread to other repositories. Anyway - a huge part of the stuff here is still valid; the SDK Help documentation continues linking to samples of this blog... So - there are good reasons to bring everything back to this famous spot and breathe new life into this blog. Vault customization is my passion, and I will do my best to serve with valuable contributions soon.

Cheers,

Markus

Effective Permissions Sample Application Update!

Hi Folks,

My name is Jeffrey Fishman. I'm a software engineer with the Vault team, and I'm hoping to bring along some goodies you'll find interesting! I'll include a photo of myself below:

The Effective Permissions sample application has been updated to work with the Vault 2021 SDK and client. Since the client now has a native tab to view effective permissions per object, that functionality was removed from the sample application. It'll simply show a permissions matrix users have for each Vault folder, depending on how you've configured the sample application settings.

For those who haven't tried this sample app yet, it calculates which permissions a user will ultimately have for viewing and manipulating a folder in Vault. You can configure the folder depth you wish to be displayed in the matrix, starting from the Vault's root folder ($).  You can also configure whether you'd like permissions to be displayed for users who don't have access to the current vault but may be available on the Vault Server, or users who have been disabled on the Vault. The last settings available are folder exclusions and inclusions. The blacklist takes higher precedence over the inclusion, and the inclusion allows you to add folders to the results that may be out of the configured folder depth's scope.

As a quick side note -- you'll want to add in a key to sign the sample code if you wish to compile it. Visual Studio allows you to do this right inside of the IDE by right-clicking on the assembly, selecting 'Properties', and then moving to the 'Signing' section on the left of the assembly properties window. 

Outside of Visual Studio, the .NET Framework provides a utility to generate strong-name key files you can find by clicking here.

 

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Screenshots of update:

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Demo Video:

 

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Requirements:

• Vault 2021 Workgroup or Professional
• Administrative rights on the Vault

Click here to download the application
Click here to download the source code

Click here to go to the previous 2014 version

Vault sample from AU 2018 class available online

Hello everyone, my name is Paul Gunn.

I'm a software architect on Vault and recently taught a class on the Vault 2019 API at Autodesk University 2018. Doug attended my class and graciously offered the opportunity to share this information with you as a guest blogger.

My class delved into new server APIs that provide (what we believe to be) new and powerful capabilities to developers. Here at Autodesk we have implemented a major client-side feature on this platform and other features in the pipe are similarly leveraging this functionality. The class downloads section includes the class handout and demo application ('material' zip file) - and a recording of the class is also available.

Here are resources available online:

General class information

Class downloads

Hope folks find this information useful!

Vault API Support

Please go to the Vault Customization discussion group if you have any questions about the Vault API.  Don’t use the comments section in this blog.

There are a few reasons for this: 

1. The discussion group is monitored by the Vault team and the Autodesk Developer Network.  So more people will see your question and respond.
2. The discussion group is better designed for highly-detailed questions.  You can have formatted text, code snippets, file attachments and so on.
3. Your question may have already been answered.  You can easily search the discussion group to see if there are similar issues.
4. I’m no longer on the Vault team.  I actually left about 2 years ago, so it’s getting hard for me to provide detailed help.

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6 Years

Today my blog turns 6, which is 110 years is binary.  To celebrate, I’m going to reveal a couple of Easter Eggs that I’ve slipped in over the years.  Specifically, the titles of some of my apps.  One thing I love about writing my own apps is that I get to pick the name.  An in two cases, I named the app in such a way as to set up a joke.  That’s just the type of guy I am.

 

Project Thunderdome:

Yes, it’s part of a movie title, but the joke goes deeper than that.  It’s probably best explained by this Mystery Science Theater 300 clip.  By the way, I’m a huge MST3K fan.

 

The TTP Project:

This app never achieved the popularity of Thunderdome, which is a shame.  I wanted to unload this joke on more people.  Basically the conversation would go like this.

(me an you chatting about PLM API programming)
Me: … You should check out my sample app, The TTP Project?
You: What does TTP stand for?
Me: The TTP Project

Again, I stole this joke from another source.  Because that’s also the type of guy I am.

-- Doug

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Item Object: Project Property

In PLM Scripting, the built-in object under item matching the Project Management tab is Project object. An Array of Project objects will be returned by calling item.project.subTasks. They give you all the projects of the item. The item here must be an instance of Item.

Basically a project task can be divided into three classes: text task, linked task and milestone task. In scripting, all of them are represented using Project object, but there is some difference when we deal with each of them. In this post, let’s talk about what the common ground they have and what the difference between them.

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Text project task

A text project task is a task not linked to any item. Its title is given by user.

var textTask = item.project.subTasks[0];

// r/w title
textTask.title = ‘new title’;

// r/w start date of project
textTask.start_date = new Date();

// r/w end date of project
textTask.end_date = new Date(new Date().getTime() + 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);

// r/w progress, must be in [0, 100]
textTask.progress = 50;

// read duration
var duration = textTask.duration;

// read owner, the parent item of the project
var owner = textTask.owner;

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Linked project task

A linked project task is a task linking to an item. It also has the same properties as a text project task, however the title property will be the linked item’s descriptor instead of the text defined by the user. The linked item can be gotten via linkedTask.item.

var linkedTask = item.project.subTasks[1];

// read linked item. An Item object is returned
var linkedItem = linkedTask.item;

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Milestone project task (Read-only task)

If a linked project contains milestones, then we call it a milestone project task, or a read-only project task because all the properties of it are read-only. That’s the only difference between linked task and milestone task.

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Create project task

The general form to create a task is:

new Task(Title/LinkedItem[, StartDate[, EndDate[,Progress]]]);

The square brackets parts are optional. The default value for both start and end dates is today, and the default progress is 0.

Create a text task:

// create a text task
var newTextTask = new Task(‘Text Task’, new Date(), new Date(new Date().getTime() + 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000), 0);
// add task into array
item.project.subTasks.push(newTextTask);

Create a linked/read-only task:

// fetch item to be linked
var itemToBeLinked = loadItem(1234);
// create linked task, leave the rest parameters default
var newLinkedTask = new Task(itemToBeLinked);
// add new task into array
item.project.subTasks.push(newLinkedTask);

 

--Michal

Project Thunderdome 2016 Source Code

We are still keeping Thunderdome open source for the 2016 release.  The app itself can be downloaded from Autodesk Exchange.  If you want the source code, it’s provided in the link below.

Click here for Project Thunderdome 2016 source code

Special thanks to Matt Smith from the Vault team for updating the app to Vault 2016.

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Syncing Vault Properties for Property Equivalence

In prior posts, Doug introduced a couple undocumented methods in the Filestore Service and described how you could use them to roll your own copy design. In this installment, I’ll show you how to use them to sync up properties to get rid of property equivalence errors.

A vaulted file will have property equivalence errors if it needs to have property values written back to it.  This behavior is controlled by the write mappings in the property definitions. The errors mean that the property values in the vault database not matching the property values stored within the file. You can remedy this situation by doing a property sync in Vault Explorer, but that’s too easy – instead let’s do the property sync via the Vault 2016 API.

In the Document Service there is a rather obscure method called GetComponentProperties, whose description in the help reads: “Gets property data for a file which has been assigned to an item”. What this method really does (in 2015-R2 and beyond) is provide exactly what needs to be written back to a file in order for it to have property equivalence. And it isn’t limited to files that have been assigned to items – it works perfectly fine where no items are present (such as in Vault Workgroup or Vault Basic).

Since nothing is easy, there are a number of potential issues that we will need to work around. First of all, if you were to blindly take the property data from GetComponentProperties and feed it to CopyFile, you may notice datetimes shifting by your timezone offset; or numerical values shifting by orders of magnitude in locales where the thousandths separator is a period (“.”) and the decimal point is a comma (“,”). That is some serious badness that must be avoided. Also, we don’t want to create a new version of each file we sync if we didn’t actually do anything – that would be really annoying.

I have wrapped up everything that needs to happen to avoid these issues in a simple class (“PropertySync”) which just has a constructor and one method. The idea is to gather the files you want to do the sync for, construct the PropertySync object once and then call its SyncProperties method on each file. The reason for the two-step process is so it only needs to get property definitions once. Many more details are in the comments.

Click here for sample code (C#)

-- Dave Mink

Security Object

In the last two posts, we saw how to access item’s fields and ownership information. We are not done talking about Item object. There are still many things we would like to cover. But before then, I am going to wrap up another object which was mentioned when we were introducing the Master property in Item. That’s the Security object. The Security object contains some utility functions dealing with users, groups and roles. And we have seen the examples using its loadUser() and loadGroup() functions. We are going to see what else the Security object has.

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Security.inGroup()

Security.inGroup(userId, groupName) returns a Boolean object to indicate if the group specified by groupName (String) contains the user specified by userId (String). For example,

if (Security.inGroup(userID, ‘Admin Group’)) {
    // the current user is in Admin Group   
} else {
    // the current user is NOT in Admin Group
}

Notes: The userID is one of the pre-loaded variables for each script indicating the user whose action triggers the script. Usually it is the current login user’s ID.

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Security.inRole()

Security.inRole(userId, roleName) checks if the user specified by the userId is in the role specified by roleName (String) by returning a Boolean object. The roleName is the displayed name for each role in Roles page [Administration –> Security –> Roles].

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Security.loadUser()

Security.loadUser(userId) returns the User specified by the userId. If no user can be found with the userId, then an empty User will be returned. For example,

var user = Security.loadUser(‘Abc’);
if (user.id === null) {
  println(“The user cannot be found.”);
}

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Security.loadGroup()

Security.loadGroup(groupName) returns the Group specified by the groupName. Like loadUser if no group cannot be found with the groupName, an empty Group object will be returned.

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Security.listGroups()

Security.listGroups(userId) returns an Array of group names (String) which the user belongs to.

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Security.listRoles()

Security.listRoles(userId) returns an Array of role names (String) which the user has. Roles don’t have direct relationship with users. Group is the middle connector with them. So to get all the roles for a user, first the server will find all the groups the user belongs to. Next all the roles in each of those groups will be collected. Then after removing all the duplicates (one role could be added into multiple groups), the collection will be returned to you.

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Security.listUsersInGroup()

Security.listUsersInGroup(groupName) returns an Array of users (User objects) that in the group.

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Security.listUsersInRole()

Security.listUsersInRole(roleName) returns an Array of users (User objects) that in the role.

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Security.searchUsers()

Security.searchUsers(criteria) returns an Array of users (User objects) matching the criteria. For example, the below function will return all the users with professional licenses and located in Toronto.

function getAllProfessionalUsersInToronto() {
    var criteria = {
        city : 'Toronto',
        licenseCode: 'S'
    };
    return Security.searchUsers(criteria);
}

--Michal