How do i drag an assembly from the vault in to a new assembly. i tried dooing it but the parts are greyed out
How do i drag an assembly from the vault in to a new assembly. i tried dooing it but the parts are greyed out
It want me to copy the parts of the assembly on to my harddrive I cannot keeps the parts in the vault
Yeah, that is normal. They are read only.
If you are adding an assembly from the vault it will copy all of the files locally to your hard drive, they are read only as Scott says unless you take ownership, but it does need to make copies on your local disk
Brian
Sammy, Brian is correct.
Do you have Enterprise PDM (EPDM) or Workgroup PDM (WPDM)?
IF you are using WPDM:
I am not familiar enough with the interface in WPDM to be of assistance.
IF you are using EPDM:
The parts are greyed out because they may not be in your local cache on your hard drive.
Assume your assembly has, for example, 4 versions, so it has been checked out and back in 4 times. If you click on the assembly file inside EPDM (Windows Explorer), click on the "Version" tab below the file section (not the folder tree), the version of your assembly should show "-/4". But in my case I have version 35 of 35 in my local cache so I have the latest verison in my cache.
If there is a "-" (dash) then the assembly file is not in your local cache on your computer so SolidWorks doesn't know it exists.
If this doesn't answer the question, it might be helpful for you to expand on which system you are using and what you mean by links.
Tim
I thought i would work on links rather than files, so that i would just drag and drop a linked file from the vault like my previous pdm system that i used
If you drag an assembly from Workgroup PDM to another assembly it will only copy the assembly file to your working folder. You won't get the parts and the sub assembly will not build correctly. You have to open the sub assembly from the WPDM vault then drag the open assembly into your main assembly.
SW does not open files while they are in the WPDM vault. Files must be copied to a working folder first.
Opening a file or sub assembly from the vault will copy the files to the vault.
In the vault, right click on the subassembly then select Open/Checkout Document. You don't need to take ownership.
You can drag parts from the vault to an assembly but not if the parts files contain other parts.
Is there a fix for this, my previous PDM system admit, only cached the files that i was working/editing on to the local hard drive the rest of the parts would remain on the server. Essentially I could build an assembly without having any parts on my local drive.
There is no way around this in PDM Workgroup. One of the "benefits" of Workgroup is that you never work on an actual file, only on a copy of the file. When you check the new assy bak into the vault you can choose to remove the local copy.
Jeff, it's the same with Enterprise. The user never works on an actual file, just a local copy and when the user checks it back in, the vault creates a new "copy" or version of the file in the PDM data folder. Likewise the user can also select to remove the local cached copy at check in.
The only reason I don't like to cache stuff is that i have pdm not enterprise. i can't stop other users modifing and up issuing part that are release to production
Sammy, You can control user access in Workgroup PDM if you turn on lifecycles. It is not as good as EPDM, but you can make files in Released lifecycyle read only and allow only select users to move the files from Released into an ECO lifecycle to allow editing.
I am curious as to what PDM system you were using that allowed opening files directly from vault. That seams to defeat one of the purposes of PDM in increasing speed by opening files from local hard drive.
Sam,
When you go to insert the assembly you should be able you browse out to the vault.