Put the version number on your EPDM datacard

Editor’s Note: As of EPDM 2012 SP4, this method works great when checking in a group of files individually. However there is an issue with Dispatch that will make this method not work when checking in files as references.

However this method does work if you change the conditions from “just before checkin” to “just after checkout”. This will update the version as soon as you check it out, making the setting the version variable to what the version is going to be….

Would you like to have the version number of your file on your SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM datacard? The Engineering Data Specialist Man is here to show you how to do it!

You can do it very easily with Dispatch. (If you don’t have Dispatch already installed in your EPDM system, follow the Dispatch link.)

After Dispatch is installed, choose to administrate:

At the  “Administrate Actions” window, choose to add a new action. Then set up the action as shown below.

Click on the “Conditions…” button next to the “During check out” and set the dialog this way:

This means that this dispatch action will run any time just before a file is checked in, for all files. (Change the path value if you don’t want it for all files.)

Yup, you can find the “check in” trigger under the “check out” trigger. Logical eh?

As you can see from the Commands list, it takes three commands to make this work.

First click “Add” and choose “For all documents”

Again click “Add”, and choose “Set Card Variables”, set the dialog like this:

Here we are setting the variable “Version” on the file’s card to the current version of the file and bumping the value by one. This adding is done at the bottom with the “add” function.

Now, click “Add” a third time and choose “End for all documents”. This will make Dispatch set the variable for all files.

That is all there is to the Dispatch setup. Now put a control on your datacard connected to the version variable and it will update automatically for you just before the file is checked in.