One of the benefits of Vault that can improve Inventor’s performance in large assemblies also makes it easier to take your work with you if you leave the office. What am I talking about…
A local working folder or “Workspace” of course. Let me fill you in on the background first: Autodesk Vault is a Client / Server application with “Checked In” data residing on the Vault Server. But data that is “Checked Out” actually resides on your local workstation’s hard drive. Vault is always automatically monitoring the relationship between the server and local data and displays its status when logged into Vault.
Due to this data residing on your local hard drive, you can log out of Vault and still work on any designs that have been checked out (and thereby cached in the local working folder). Tata Technologies typically even Vaults files such as Templates and Style library data so you can work without interruption when disconnected from the corporate network.
As mentioned earlier, due to the data being local when you are working in a Vault environment, large assemblies in Inventor can be more responsive to the common tasks of opening and saving regularly as well.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks
As Autodesk has developed new document focused lifecycle and revision control with the 2010 products, it is now much easier to manage documents like 2D AutoCAD drawings. With that said, it is still up to us to determine what information we would like to capture when using Vault to manage those AutoCAD files. Here is the core of extracting specific data out of your files: “Block Attribute Extraction”. This dialog box is part of the Autodesk Data Management Server console, and allows us to define block names that we want to extract attributes for:
Once the block names are defined and a drawing is checked into Vault, the attribute tags (or prompts) will show up in the “Property Definition” dialog box as shown below. This can be found in the Administration settings on the Tools pull-down menu.
But just because a block’s attributes are indexed doesn’t mean that they are in use or searchable yet. In the image above, I had to change from “Not in Use” to “In Use” and then re-index the vault properties before they would become useful in the Vault client interface.
I have often suggested that a Vault administrator set up a periodic purge of old file versions, but many people are worried that something important could be lost in an automatic scripted purge. If you occasionally run across a few files with way too many versions stored in Vault, you can manually purge just the versions you can do without. Just right click on the versions to remove in the History tab and pick “Purge”.
One of the comments I often hear when discussing Vault with somone is that the viewing tab within Vault doesn’t give them enough space to really view a drawing well. There are a couple of other viewing options including:
1) The View button (Launches a separate viewing window)
2) The “Open in DWF application” right click option
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