Some background info:

I have developed a macro to make printing drawings in our company easier.  It checks for sheet size, sets the appropriate print options and spits the drawing out of a printer.  Additionally it can crawl through a BOM of an open assembly drawing and print all of the relevant drawings.  All seems good here.

We use Solidworks PDM Profession for data/workflow management and at the beginning of a design cycle the PDM system places a watermark property on the parts and drawings that is just a text string that says "NOT FOR PRODUCTION!".  In our drawings sheet formats there are two overlapping notes that have "$PRPSHEET:"Watermark"", and "$PRP:"Watermark"".  When the part and drawing are released PDM changes the properties in the part and drawing to " " (a space) and then when a user opens the drawing the "NOT FOR PRODUCTION!" watermark note is not visible in the drawings.  We also have the PDM option "Always work with the latest version..." turned on.

Okay, on to the issue:

If I work on a drawing and then it gets released by a colleague I can open the drawing and it, in some circumstances, might still have the "NOT FOR PRODUCTION!" text in the drawing.  Although we have "Always work with latest version" turned on, and it gets the latest version of the draft and part file, it is not updating the part properties that are being used in the draft until I actually open the part file and load it into memory (if you can tell me how to fix this issue you will be my new BFF).  This is an okay workaround for a user who notices that a drawing has this text on it, but the print macro that runs based on a BOM might spit out 20 drawings with the text on it because it just doesn't know better.  Originally I thought I would just check the note for text and open the part if I found the watermark note, but unfortunately the note always just contains "$PRPSHEET:"Watermark"".  How can I tell if the "NOT FOR PRODUCTION!" text is present?