Easier property management and viewing in Vault 2010

One of the troublesome aspects of managing the previous Vault versions was the inability to differentiate between properties that originated from different sources. There is now a predominant (I) after property names for any Inventor files, and this helps out a ton with determining what I am looking at in the properties pane as shown below.

This nomenclature can also be seen in the Property Definitions dialog box when configuring the display and use of properties in the Vault Administration tools.



Now mapping file and system properties is much easier knowing when Inventor is the source property. The same concept also applies to properties extracted from AutoCAD attributes where the property is now appended with an (A).

Contributed by Ben of the CAD Geeks

Enhanced Property Viewing in Vault 2010

One of the new features in the latest Vault 2010 that I am really digging is the addition of the "Properties" tab when viewing the details of a particular file. This new tab makes if much easier to quickly scan all of the meta-data associated with a file, and helps to determine if a general search returned the expected result based on the property data with the file. This will allow us to use much more general searches to locate a group of files rather than using the advanced Find tool to try and narrow the search to a single result.

As an example, check out the search used in these images:






As you can see, the search results show partial property matches in multiple properties to locate the two files returned by the search. This more flexible search is now possible with a new technique using a concept called "search tokens" to be covered in a future data management blog post. Stay tuned.

Contributed by Ben of the CAD Geeks

How Properties affect Vault Searching

Since the 2009 release of Vault and ProductStream, the properties available for Vault searching now need to be explicitly designated for use in a "Basic" search. This is done in the Property Definition area of the Administration dialog box. This is also used to turn off properties that are not needed and may be cluttering search results with a bunch of unwanted files.

Contributed by Ben of the INCAT CAD Geeks