I have tried different ways of wording this question and gone through many search results, but was unable to find an answer. Has anyone figured out a good way to accomplish this? I have users that are releasing assys that have a slew of unreleased models in them, and I want to make it so this cannnot happen. Using PDM 2017.
Thanks,
J. Lackey
Grrr!!! How how this product been around this long and not have that option?!! Still like PDM a lot though. Thanks for the response. I initially thought I might be able to put a dispatch in place that could prevent it, but since you can't have it go through a model structure and check states on all of the sub components, at least that I saw, that went out the window pretty quickly.
It's my favorite ER as well and I'm closely following it.
I have seen companies who actually don't mind it. It boggles my mind but for certain businesses and processes, they don't care if the model isn't approved before the drawings. The cool thing is PDM is robust enough to handle both sides.
I think that function, when added, will add some time to performance so I am grateful that development is working to make sure it's just so before rushing it out in release.
A trick I have used in some vaults: I create a check box variable on drawing/assembly cards that says something to the effect of "Have you checked there reference files"? I then use that variable as a conditions on transition so it does force users to check it before proceeding. When the file comes out of the released state, i have a transition action that re-clears it. It at least reminds a human to quality check.
You can do this with an add-in. You can add a hook for EdmCmd_PreState and check all the references using GetReferenceTree and then check the state on each reference. If any of the references aren't in the correct state, set the mbCancel flag on the EdmCmd passed to the add-in OnCmd method and the state change will be cancelled.
oooooooh... Good call Jim! I'm going to have to up my coding game.... Do you have an example of this add-in?
I've cobbled together a small example. I can't test it yet since our IT group has removed admin rights on our machines which prevents me from registering the add-in. Once I get it sorted out I'll test it and then post it here. Probably tomorrow.
IT took longer than expected. Quick and dirty sample add-in is attached. It is specific to my vault setup, but can be changed without much trouble. Be sure to generate a different GUID (they are supposed to be globally unique). Easiest thing to do is create a new add-in project and then replace the generated code with the code provided.
The important parts are the getReferences method and the allFilesAreReleased method.
The getReferences method uses GetReferenceTree to fetch the children of a file. The list of children is then checked one at a time to see if their state is 'Approved' or 'Ready For Use' which are the two states in my workflows that represent 'released' parts. The other code is boilerplate add-in stuff or utility methods I copied from my Utilities class to handle tasks that come up a lot with EPDM code, (e.g. getting the folder associated with a file).
No warranties. Very little error checking. Use at your own risk.
Yes!! I would love to see an example as I am new to coding and that would be a huge help!
I think you are looking for the enhancement request filed under SPR 334220: Need workflow transition condition that blocks transition if referenced files are not meeting a certain condition, i.e a parent can only be approved if children are already approved
For example, you can't push a drawing through to the next state unless they are taking the references with it or the references are also being transitioned.
I believe they are working on this and had some variation of this in beta 1 for 2019. After testing, it needed much more work so unfortunately I believe it's out of 2019 commercial release but they are actively working on it!