In June of 2015, this cat claimed that wildcards are usable in EPDM searches (http://www.hawkridgesys.com/blog/solidworks-epdm-wildcard-searches/). I have never seen any of these work, and boy have I tried.
DOS had wildcards. That the authors of EPDM cannot utilize 1980's technology is catastrophically pathetic.
Or is it something whatever person setup our EPDM vault did? I would really, really like to use wildcards in EPDM searches.
Hi Chris,
Wildcards do work, but they are slightly peculiar, compared to how we are used to in other programs. I'll try to illustrate.
If you search on a portion of the filename, PDM will find it. In my vault I did a search for "assem" and found 9 files.
But, if I substitute the first couple of letters with a wildcard, "*sem", all of a sudden I find nothing.
Without wildcards, PDM will find your text anywhere in the filename (or variable). But, once you introduce wildcards, it does a more literal search. That is, "*sem" means a file could start with anything, but has to end with "sem". But, my Solidworks assemblies end with "sldasm", so it finds nothing. If I add a wildcard to the end of the search - "*sem*" - I once again get my 9 files.
You can also use "?" to substitute for a single character. Thus, "?sem*" returns nothing, but "?ssem*" returns my 9 files again.
This example used the "name" field, but the same concepts apply to all variable fields.
Jeff
Also another note on wildcards:
If you search for Assy 1 (note the space!) then you will get all results that match Assy and all results that match 1
To search for the whole phrase you need to use the search term "Assy 1" which will then return all results that contain (not just equal) the phrase Assy 1
Regards
David
Wildcards work fine for me here. Might be your setup, but I'm not sure what would prevent searches from working correctly with wildcards. I suggest you call your VAR and show them your problem, they might have better insight.