It's All Just Ones and Zeros

Reserve Numbers

This post follows a continuous demand to integrate the extension "Reserve Numbers" in other environments.

First, let me briefly introduce the scope and benefits of this extension sample for those who have never heard about "Reserve Numbers": 

Reserve Numbers allows Vault Professional Client users to create numbers consuming Vault File, Item, or Change Order numbering schemes.

 

Outcome Options | Benefits

• Leverages Numbering Scheme per Entity types
  • Files (also used for Folders, Custom Objects)
  • Items
  • Change Orders
• Reserving Item Numbers creates empty items
• Generated Numbers are copied to the Windows Clipboard and can be directly pasted into tables using the CTRL+V keys, e.g., Inventor iPart or Model State part number columns.

Reserve Numbers is a Vault Data Standard extension and ships with my well-known sample configuration VDS-MFG-Sample. Now, suppose you want to copy this tool into your customized environment. In that case, you need to know some steps not as obvious as copying the additional configuration files sharing the name "*reservenumbers*".

My new instructional presentation detailed the copy and merge tasks: Download Autodesk Vault Data Standard -- Customization Sample ReserveNumbers

Happy reserving :),

Markus

 

 

Thunderdome is still alive, but...

The "Project Thunderdome" is alive and published updated source code and installers for 2023 and 2024 today!

You might have lost the track that "Project Thunderdome" took over the past few years when it disappeared from the App Store.

So there is good news about the current "Thunderdome Sample" code base:

• Access source code and installer versions on the projects "Releases" section for Vault 2022, 2023 and 2024
• The latest update (2023.1, 2024.1) filters _V folders from custom folder deployments downloading files from Vault
• The fork "Thunderdome Sample" is slightly different from "Project Thunderdome" latest app store version:
  • Manage deployments leveraging the role permissions of Configuration Admins instead of the built-in Administrator user
  • Include Search Groups in deployments
  • Include Data Standard Custom Help files
  • Include custom folder deployments
  • Access source code (Thunderdome Sample) and installable versions for evaluations (Thunderdome Sample Releases)

But - you should follow the latest Vault Professional enhancements in 2024: Inventor Vault auto-deploys Design Data and Templates with a straightforward setup: Extend the Vault IPJ mapping with design data and template folders, and all Vault users stay up to date with the latest styles and templates.

The sample extension did not adopt Vault light or dark themes for good reasons: it required a complete re-design of the admin and user dialogs based on Windows presentation foundation dialogs (leveraging the themed resources of Vault Data Standard) or would enforce individual DevExpress licensing on your side if I implemented themed forms based on the DevExpress libraries.

- Markus

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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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

Another Way to Update Properties

If you want to update a Vault property and that property is mapped to a value within the file, you have a couple of options, and they both suck.  This post is to introduce a third, and non-sucky, option in Vault 2015 R2.  Again, I’ll be using the previously undocumented functions from Copy Design.

Sucky option 1 is to checkout and download the CAD file.  Next, use the appropriate CAD API to update the file on disk.  Lastly, check the file back in to Vault.  What makes this option so difficult is that you need to involve the CAD API.  It would be nice to do just everything from within the Vault API.

Sucky option 2 is to use IExplorerUtil.UpdateFileProperties in the Vault API.  On paper, this is a great function.  It loads up core pieces of Vault Explorer libraries and executes the Edit Properties command just as if a user had done it through the UI.  It even handles the checkout/checkin.  The problem is that it’s a bulky operation and prone to failure.  Vault Explorer simply wasn’t meant to be invoked from the API.  IExplorerUtil was always indented to be a temporary solution until something better came along.  And that something better is here....

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The new option is to use the Copy Design features.  Similar to how you can ‘roll your own’ copy design, you can also run a property update without ever invoking a CAD API or downloading the file.  It’s a 4 step process:

Step 1: Check out the file
DocumentService.CheckoutFile(...)

This step reserves the file to you for editing.  It also gives you a download ticket, which you will need in the next 2 steps.  Although you are not actually downloading anything, the ticket is the currency that the FilestoreService uses.

Step 2: Read the property definitions from the file
FilestoreService.GetContentSourcePropertyDefinitions(...)

This step interrogates the binary file and pulls out the names properties that you may be able to edit.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you the current values on those properties.  Also keep in mind that this is the property as it appears in the file, which may not be the same name that it appears in Vault.  In fact, it may not be mapped to a Vault property at all.

Step 3:  Copy the binary contents file
FilestoreService.CopyFile(...)

This step will create a new binary blob of data in the Vault filestore.  It also lets you update properties on that blob.  The ‘writeReqs’ parameter let’s you pass in new values for the properties you discovered in part 2.  Only properties you pass in are updated.  All others are left with their existing value. 
It’s possible that not all properties you supplied will get updated, so check the ‘writeResults’ out parameter for confirmation.

Step 4: Check-in the file
DocumentService.CheckinUploadedFile(...)

This steps ties the binary data in the filestore with actual records in the Vault database.  Without this step, you just have a blob of data floating in limbo.  Although you copied binary data, it won't be used for creating a new File Master like with copy design.  Instead, you are creating a new version of an existing file.  From the filestore’s point of view, there is no difference between the two.  Both are just blobs of binary data.

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Sample Code

You didn’t think I would go through all this without providing any sample code, did you?  Not a chance.  I actually have an mini app that illustrates this workflow and the a simple Copy Design workflow from the previous post.  Includes C# and VB.NET source code. Enjoy.

Click here to download

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Roll Your Own Copy Design

Previously, I documented two new functions related to the new Copy Design app in Vault 2015 R2.  Now I would like to explore some uses for those functions.  The most obvious usage is to build your own Copy Design algorithm that meets your specific needs.

Technically, a custom Copy Design as always possible in Vault, but these new functions make things easier.  Most significantly, your app does not have to engage in any CAD-specific APIs.  Assuming, of course, the CAD file is one of the types that Vault recognizes. 

I said that the new functions make a custom Copy Design easier, but it’s still not something I would describe as simple.  You still have to manage things like file relationships, and file naming.

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For each file you want to copy, you basically have to do three steps:

Step 1:  Get a download ticket.
DocumentService.GetDownloadTicketsByFileIds(...)

You are not actually downloading anything, but let’s not worry about that for the moment.  The important thing is that we are swapping the File Id for ticket, and the ticket is required in step 2. 

Step 2:  Copy the binary file contents.
FilestoreService.CopyFile(...)

This step will do a server-side copy of the file bits.  Nothing is actually download or uploaded from your computer.  The operation just does a copy of the binary data.  The meta data still has not been copied yet, so it doesn’t really exist in Vault.  It has no file name, no folder location, no create time, and so on.  It’s basically a set of data floating in limbo.

Step 3:  Add the file to Vault
DocumentService.AddUploadedFile(...)

This step is where you tell the Vault database about the file.  It’s here that you set the new name, new location, and new relationships for the copied file.  Again, the function name isn’t technically correct.  We didn’t upload the file, but this function doesn’t care.  It just needs an uploadTicket so that it can cement the binary data to the meta data.

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Another key aspect of the copy is that the internal file relationships have not yet been modified.  Step 2 is a perfect copy, so it still has pointers to old file names.  Vault is designed so that file relationships are updated when the file is downloaded.  This is another reason you want to use AcquireFiles when downloading.  It fixes up the references for your local files.

The new copy design app works the same way.  It relies on download to fix up and broken references.  Those references will technically stay broken until an engineer checks out the files, makes changes and checks the files back in.

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