It's All Just Ones and Zeros

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

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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Welcoming Michal Liu

You may have noticed that the last couple of articles have come from a new blogger.  Please join me in welcoming Michal Liu to the blogosphere.  He is the scripting expert on the PLM 360 development team.  After 5+ years of running this blog, it’s nice to get some new blood. 

It’s also nice to have some PLM 360 focus.  It’s a highly configurable product with a powerful scripting engine.  You can do some really cool things with it.  There are also right and wrong ways to use it, so it’s good to have a technical guide.

If there is a specific topic you would like covered, let Michal know.  Speaking from experience, feedback is always welcome. 

-- Doug

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Updated Vault 2015 R2 SDK

Many of you doing development on Vault 2015 R2 have noticed some issues with the SDK.  For example, the What’s New page is for the 2015 release and there is no list of changes for 2015 R2.

Those issues should now be fixed.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  Please un-install your current Vault 2015 R2 SDK and install the fixed SDK: Vault_2015_R2_SDK-Fixed.zip

If you have questions about the Vault API, the best place to go is the Vault Customization discussion group.

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Vault 2015 R2

Warning: A new version of Vault has been released to Subscription Center.  For the first time in many years, the Vault team put out a full release in between the standard yearly releases.  R2 is not a service pack, which is why you need to be careful.

If you are installing for the first time, R2 is a good enough starting point.  But if you are already running Vault in production, you will probably want to wait until Vault 2016.  Upgrading to R2 is only for those who need the new features right now.

You thought I was joking about the warning?  This is actual UI from the installer.

As usual, I’ll stick to the API-related stuff and leave it to other blogs to go over the end-user feature set.  There is a pretty good overview over at Design and Motion.

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Vault 2015 R2 technical details:
Just like with any other full release, 2015 R2 has it’s own SDK with its own DLLs and web services.

• Version number: 20.x.x.x
  The 2015 release has 19 as the version number.
• Web service URL path:  /AutodeskDM/Services/v19.1/
  Technically it should be v20 in the path.  The important part is that it’s different than v19, which is the path to the 2015 web services.
• Web service compatibility:  A 2015 R2 server is compatible with the following clients:
  • 2015 R2
  • 2015*
  • 2014*
  • 2013*

* = No compatibility for Item and Package services.  Those services are completely disabled.

• Package Service disabled for R2.  Almost every function will return an error.
• Plug-in compatibility:  As usual, plug-ins need to be re-compiled for each version.
  • ApiVersion attribute needs to be set to “8.0”
  • The .vcet.config files need to reference version “20.0.0.0” of any Vault SDK DLLs.
• Plug-ins should go in the folder “%ProgramData%\Autodesk\Vault 2015 R2\Extensions”
• When developing for the Autodesk Exchange app store, “V2015R2” is the value to use for the SeriesMin and SeriesMax values in the package.xml.
• Vault Office Client and the full Vault Explorer Client are binary equivalents.  Any plug-in you write will load in both clients.  There is no way for your code to detect which client it’s running in.
• R2 uses .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 is still the recommended IDE.  No change from 2015.

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PLM 360 API Licensing and Enterprise Features

PLM 360 recently updated it’s pricing page, so I’d like to point out a few things that are of interest to API developers. 

API development is open to users with either a Professional or Enterprise license.  For in-house development, you can use your own Pro license for writing custom utilities.  For third party development, you can contact the Autodesk Development Network if you want a tenant and Pro license for development purposes.

Sandbox environments are available.  This is very useful if you are writing an app or integration that modifies data.  Speaking from experience, you don’t want to debug on live data.  A sandbox environment is a clone of your live data.  So you can develop and debug your app without the worry of corrupting "real" data.  You are allowed one data refresh per month, so you still need to be careful.

Sandbox environments can either be on the regular production environment or on a “Preview” server.  Preview tenants run the beta code for the next release, so you can see changes before they go live.  This is useful if you have an integration that you need to keep healthy.  A Preview tenant can be used detect breakages before they happen.  At this time, I don’t have details on how much lead time you get with a Preview tenant.  I think it varies from release to release.

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What’s new in the Vault 2015 SDK

Vault 2015 has just been released.  Here is a quick breakdown of what’s new and what’s changed in the API.  Overall, these changes are reactions to changes in the Vault product itself.  There’s nothing new here specific to API developers.

 

Edited out of Turn enhancements

Vault has changed how it handles changes to files that have not been checked out.  It used to show an “edited out of turn” icon.  In 2015, the status now matches the status of the last downloaded state of the file (before the local edits).  An extra piece of information is provided indicating the “dirty” status of the local file.  This data is available through the UI and API.

When acquiring a file in this “dirty” state, the download will not proceed unless a “force override” option is applied.  This override can be done through both UI and non-UI workflows in the API.

 

Item BOM updates

There have been changes to the BOM workflows.  A lot of these changes are around being able to add items first and easily hook to files later on.  Previous releases favored file-first workflows. Another workflow change is the ability to promote only part of a BOM, instead of being an “all or nothing” operation.
There are also some new concepts, such as “on” and “off” BOM rows.

 

Vault 2012 clients are no longer compatible

You will not be able to use any of your Vault 2012 clients with Vault 2015 server.  This includes CAD applications (like AutoCAD 2012 and Inventor 2012), Vault 2012 SharePoint integration, custom apps, etc.

 

Compatibility with 2013 and 2014 clients*

Vault 2013 and 2104 clients are compatible with Vault 2015 server.

* Calls to the Item and Package service will result in a runtime error.  This is due to breaking changes to the Item BOM workflows.  If your app is using either of these services, you should update to the 2015 SDK.

 

.NET 4.5

SDK DLLs are built against .NET 4.5.  Visual Studio 2012 is the recommended development environment.

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What’s new in the PLM 360 API - 9.3 release

PLM 360 was updated last weekend.  The Read Me First page has a listing of new REST API pages, but I’d like to also point some things out.

• New Feature - Better error information when adding or updating an item.  Now if the operation fails because of bad field data, you will get back information on which field(s) caused the failure.  It’s a big time saver when, for example, you are updating an item with 100 fields on it.  See FieldValidationError for more information.
• New Feature - Item and System change logs.  You can now read the change logs through the API.  The Item change log shows you all recent item changes.  The System Configuration change log shows changes to workspaces and other system level objects.  Both APIs require admin-level access.
• Enhancement - Max page size increased to 5000 when getting items.  Only applies to the get Items endpoint.  100 is still the max page size for other endpoints.
• Bugfix - filtered picklist values - When getting or setting filtered picklist values, the PicklistValue object should have a displayName field but not an id or url field.  This is because a filtered picklist is just a filter value, not a pointer to a specific item.  However, Item Detail is an exception.  In those cases, PicklistValue should have all 3 values set.
• API Change - Integer to Long - Most integer values have been changed to long.  For example, Item.Id.  If your app is currently using integers, you should be OK as long as you don’t have over 2 billion objects in your tenant.

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Beta Invite

If you are interested in the Beta for the upcoming Vault release, here is the invite link:  https://beta.autodesk.com/callout/?callid=0CEA9DDA3D144841A8DE3679943A440F

There are some nice end-user enhancements that I cannot go over here.  You can also use the beta forums to ask questions about API changes.

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New API features in 9.2

Here are the new REST API features in the 9.2 release of PLM 360.

• New endpoint:  Get the list of users ( /api/v2/users ).  The user information is very basic, and any logged-in user can call this API.
• New endpoint:  Get your user profile ( /api/v2/users/profile ).  This returns detailed information about the logged-in user only.
• New endpoint:  Get the list of groups ( /api/v2/groups ).  The group information is very basic, and any logged-in user can call this API.
• New endpoint:  Get the main menu ( /api/v2/menu ).  Shows the configurable parts of the menu, which is just the grouped workspace list.
• Updated payload:  Ownership and Audit added to ItemDetail.  Ownership shows the owner and additional owners on the item.  Audit shows information about item creation and when it was last updated.  This data will be null if the user does not have the “View Owner and Change Summary Section” permission.
• Bug fix: Picklist values can be updated by passing in a valid picklist value.
• Known issue:  Error is returned if you pass in a null for a picklist value.  In other words, there is no way to clear a picklist value through the API.
• Known issue:  Error is returned if you try to set a filtered picklist value for a picklist not using the Item Descriptor.

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Update: Oxygen Key Scope

The Oxygen team just added a feature that allows *.autodeskplm360.net as the scope on a Consumer Key.  Previously you couldn’t have a wildcard in the front, which meant your key would only work on a specific PLM 360 tenant.

Now you can use the *.autodeskplm360.net scope to write apps that work with all PLM 360 tenants.  Of course, you can still scope things to a specific tenant if you want.  A narrow scope is useful for things like in-house utilities and consulting projects.

If you already have an Oxygen key, you can get the scope changed.  Just make another key request and indicate that you want the scope updated on your existing key.  Make sure to include your public Consumer Key in the request.

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