Vault lifecycle display in Inventor drawings

by Chris Smith

Introduction

A great feature in Autodesk Vault Professional is the lifecycle system that allows users to apply criteria to files and documents to manage the behaviour and transitions of the documents through each stage of the design and rework processes.

As this information is already created and updated by Vault, we can leverage this system to display the correct information in our drawings regarding the “State” of the file. This can be helpful to share non-Vault and/or CAD users or external contractors/suppliers as they may have difficulty retrieving this information.

In this blog I will show how we can link Vault system property information to our CAD models.

Vault Property mapping

First, we will need to map the Vault data into a property that we can reuse.

Below you can see I created a custom property called Vault_Status in my drawing template file. I will then check this file into Vault to use in the next process.

(To be able to complete this step you will need to have administrator access to the Vault)

1. Open the Vault client and navigate to Tools > Administration > Vault Settings > Behaviours > Properties and navigate to the State (Historical) system property.

2. Select the Edit option at the top of the window and click the “Mapping” text tab.

3. The image above shows 2 property mapping I have already created for Inventor and office documents. To set up these mappings click the “Click here to add new mappings” option at the top of the list. This will add a new line to the top of the list.

4. Fill in the details as below:

a. Entity – File

b. Provider – Autodesk Inventor

c. File property – Select Import Properties, then Import from Vault

d. Navigate to the file you just checked into Vault

e. Select the custom property you just created from the properties list

f. The last 2 options are for the mapping direction, which will be Vault to file and set Create to yes.
This will send the system data to the file and if the custom property is not present in the file, it will create the custom property.

5. Now the property has been mapped, we can set up the property in our drawing title block in the Inventor drawing file.

6. Now when we save a new drawing file, the Vault status will be represented in the title block.

This can be a useful tool to ensure our products are being manufactured from the correct “Released” state and avoid costly mistakes from manufacturing items that are still in design stages.