Mass transfer - Part 1

What does an Engineering Data Specialist do? Mostly I help people create engineering data [DriveWorks, SOLIDWORKS, API, best practices] and maintain their existing data. [PDM, API].

I have just received an assignment to help one of our customers in New Philadelphia, Ohio (just south of Canton) move their legacy data into PDMWorks Workgroup. However there are a few twists:

• They have been using Workgroup for a while now, current assemblies can reference files in or out of the vault.
• The legacy files use a different naming convention than they use now. Most notably the file name contains the revision letter. They want all files that go into the vault to meet their current naming convention.
• The files need to go into the proper Workgroup project….this project is calculated by the file name.

So the battle plan is:

• use the bulk load tool to put the files into a temporary project
• use PDMWorks’ API to rename the files
• use API to delete all but the latest version of the files (first ensuring the files aren’t referenced somewhere)
• use the API to move the files into the proper project

Putting the files in early and using the bulk load tool, gives us a couple of advantages. I don’t have to write code to add the files, I can use Workgroup’s the API to handle the moving and renaming -the file references for the SOLIDWORKS files should remanin intact.

We are looking at adding just slightly over 16,000 files. It took nearly four hours just for the bulk load tool to dig through their existing directories – looking for SOLIDWORKS files to add. (We’ll do their AutoCAD files later.)

The files are being checked in now, it looks like it is going to be a long process. I’m going to let it run overnight and we’ll look at the report in the morning.