It's All Just Ones and Zeros

Webinar Series

Update:  The webinar is over, but you can go here for all the recordings.

Coming in January, I will be presenting a webinar series on Vault 2011 API programming.  The format will consist of case studies on some of the sample applications available on this blog.

Case Study	Speaker	Date	Registration
Effective Folder Permissions	Doug Redmond	January 12th	Completed
Recycle Bin	Doug Redmond	January 19th	Completed
Watch Folder	Doug Redmond	January 25th	Completed

In each of the sessions, I will explain what the app is, how it works, what went right, and what went wrong.  You do not need to have prior knowledge of the application.

However, you do need to have programming knowledge.  The sessions will be highly technical, so expect to see lots of source code.  C# or VB.NET experience is preferred.

'May' and 'Must' Search Rules

The Advanced Advanced Find application shows how to make use of the "search rule" concept.  This is one of the very few features that's available only in the API.  For some reason, the out-of-the-box search dialog does not expose this feature.

Now that I have a sample out on this feature, I'd like to explain a bit more on how to use it.  In the API there are 3 rule types:  May, Must and MustNot.  MustNot doesn't work, so I'll only focus on May and Must.  In programming terms, I like to think of May and Must statements as OR and AND conditions respectively. 

The Must (AND) behavior is what is exposed in the UI find dialog, and it's the behavior from versions earlier than 2011.  The May (OR) behavior is new for Vault 2011.  At least it is new at the Search Condition level. 

It is possible to use the word "or" in the value of the search condition (see picture below).  It does result in OR behavior, but that trick can only be used on a single property.  The May rule is the only way to OR together different properties.    

 

Usage:
In order for the search to work properly, the following requirements must be met:

• The search contains at least 1 Must condition
• May conditions must have at least one other May condition.  In other words, you can have 0 May conditions or more than 1 May conditions.  If there is only 1 May condition, it is ignored.

 

Order of operations:
The order that the conditions are in does not matter.  The reason is that all the May conditions are grouped together and OR'ed against each other.  The result is then AND'ed to the Must statements.

For example, the collection of conditions { May X, Must Y, May Z}  can be rewritten as (X or Z) and Y.  Since everything is grouped together in this manner, the search conditions can be in any order.

Advanced Advanced Find

Update:  Click here for the 2013 version.  Sorry, there is no 2012 version.

Sometimes the Advanced Find feature in Vault is not enough.  You need something more advanced, specifically something that supports OR style searches.  With that in mind, I created the Advanced Advanced Find dialog.

Overview:
The dialog works similar to the Advanced tab in the regular Find dialog.  However there is one new thing, the Rule parameter.  This can be either Must or May.  Must is the default behavior and means that the search condition must be met in order for the object to show up in the search results.  The May option means that an object will show up  if it satisfies at least 1 of the conditions. 

Requirements:
Vault Workgroup/Collaboration/Professional 2011

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

Author's Note:
Yes, I know that the standard Find dialog does many things that my dialog doesn't (saved searches, reports, that animated hourglass icon, etc), but "Find Dialog That Is Advanced In One Specific Way" was too long of a title.

Selection Sets in Vault Explorer

Update: Additonal features have been added for Vault 2012.  This article focuses on the Vault 2011 features.

You have a command or tab view in Vault Explorer.  And you have your command and tab view handlers in place for when the user interacts with your control.  These handlers get a Context object passed in so that your code can know things about the state of the application.  More specifically, your code can determine which things have been selected.

Let's take a deeper look at these selection sets.

Each set is a collection of ISelection objects.  Each object consists of three pieces of data.  The Label is the display value of the things selected.  The TypeId tells you what type of object is selected.  The ID tells you the Vault ID of the thing selected.  So the things you can do with a selection is dependant on what type it is.

TypeId	Id meaning
File	File.MasterId
Folder	Folder.Id
Item	Item.Id
Bom	Item.Id
Change Order	ChangeOrder.Id
Other	"-1"  Whatever is selected is not supported.
None	Not used

Make sure to always check the type before you attempt to use the ID value.  The HelloWorld sample in the SDK has a great example of not following this rule.

 

The Current Selection Set represents the currently selected thing, assuming the thing supports the selection set framework.  It's possible to have nothing selected, so this set may be empty.  But if you are running from a context menu, this should always always have at least 1 value.

Here is a list of things that can have selection sets :

• The navigation tree
• The main View grid
• The history tab (items only)
• The where used tab (items only)
• The change order tab
• The records tab (items only)
• The Find dialog

 

The Nav Selection Set represents the tree view on the left.  If a Folder is selected, this will contain a selection type Folder with an ID value.  For non-folder items, such as saved searches or the Item Master, you will get Other as the type with -1 as the ID.  There should always be 1 value in this set. 

 

The View Selection Set represents the selections in the main grid.  It works pretty much how you would expect.  In cases where there is a pop-up menu, like the find dialog, the View selection set is still from the main grid on the parent dialog.

 

The Preview Selection Set seems to be mostly useless for files.  Even if you do have a file selected, it shows up as an Other type with -1 as the ID. 
However, with Items, you can select BOM Items and get BOM selection data.  The History and Where Used tabs both give Item selections as you would expect.  For the other tabs (General, View and custom) the selection set will match the view selection set.
Change Orders mostly don't use this set.  With the Records tab, you can get all the Item objects properly, but Files show up as Other with -1 Ids.