2 Replies Latest reply on Oct 24, 2017 2:56 PM by Jim Steinmeyer

    Good or bad to have Inventor Project file in EPDM?

    Rekha Rajendran
    Rekha Rajendran Oct 18, 2017 11:28 PM

      Hello All

       

      We use Inventor and EPDM vault, is it a best practice to have the Inventor project file (.ipj) inside the EPDM vault?

       

      We use an approach of using a standard project file used by everyone for almost every project. This is creating multiple problems for us now. Since a single project file is referenced by thousands of CAD files, any interaction with the CAD files in EPDM is really slow.

       

      We are thinking of deleting the standard project file from the vault (which takes a few days to remove all the references and do all kind of other related stuff) and moving it to outside the vault. Is that a good/bad idea? Has someone tried this before?

       

      Thanks

      Rekha

        • Re: Good or bad to have Inventor Project file in EPDM?
          Rekha Rajendran
          Rekha Rajendran Oct 24, 2017 2:21 PM (in response to Rekha Rajendran)

          Another attempt to get this on the radar.

           

          Our major problem is since a single project file is referenced by thousands of CAD files, any interaction with the CAD files in EPDM is really slow.

          For example opening an assembly file (saved in the EPDM vault) in Inventor would take so much time because before spinning up the Inventor session, it would take a ~1-2min to do reference checks.

          If the same assembly is saved in the EPDM vault with the ipj outside PDM it is 2x-3x faster. We have been doing some testing in non-prod vaults and don't see any problems with this approach of deleting the ipj file from the EPDM vault and creating new one outside the EPDM vault.

           

          I want to know if someone thinks this is a really bad idea, we are completely missing something here or have some comments/questions

          Because as far as I understand, once these references are removed & ipj is deleted from the vault, if we find after a month or later that this is a really bad move, it is creating more issues than before, then going back to the old state would be really difficult considering the number of files, time and effort involved.

           

          Thanks

          Rekha

            • Re: Good or bad to have Inventor Project file in EPDM?
              Jim Steinmeyer
              Jim Steinmeyer Oct 24, 2017 2:56 PM (in response to Rekha Rajendran)

              I have to say that after using both Pro-E and SW for several years my biggest challenge in using Inventor was to warp my head around Projects and project files. I never could understand the reasoning behind them or why we would want to use them.

               

              If you are using a part or assembly across several different projects, why not place the items in the general PDM vault structure? I believe you can place identifying tags in the cards of a part in the vault and use those tags to indicate which projects the items are used in. (I haven't used PDM for a couple of years so I could be remembering wrong.) Then if you have each project on the card you can search for it that way and just add each new project as it is added. This way you don't need to be moving the part from folder to folder. However if you move an item within the vault structure the links will be updated by PDM so it will still be found.

               

              I hope I understood your question and this helped.