What am I Supposed to Ignore?

After all of these years of Great Aunt Eleanor giving me the silent treatment, you would think I would be the world expert on being ignored. However it has always been hard for me to remember how SOLIDWORKS Enterprise’s “Ignore permissions in previous states” option works.

The help file leads you to believe it is a simple issue -basically saying when this option is off, EPDM will remember and use the rights from previous states. In reality, it is much more complex.

What makes it hard is that some workflow rights from previous states are used, some are not. To compound the confusion, you can have different behaviors depending on the rights in the current state!

So get out your crib sheets, here is how to calculate what rights you will have in a state when the “Ignore permissions in previous states”option is off.

• “Delete“, “Move” and “Increment Revision” rights are what I call negatives. If you have ever lost this right, you will not have it in this state even if this state specifically grants it to you.
• “Read file contents“, “Permit or deny group-level access to files” and “Share files to another folder” are positives, if you ever have had this right, you will have it in this state even if this state specifically does not grant it to you.
• The “Checkout file” and “Rename” rights are not affected by this option. You will have this right if the current state permits it.

A state where the “Ignore permissions in previous states” flag is turned on, provides a temporary override of the above rules…kind of like “base” when playing tag. Once that file moves back into a state with the ignore option off, the above rules come right back into play.

Crazy powerful, and if you stop to think about it, this is the way most companies work. Thus the default is correct, most of the time this option should be off.