Managing Your Properties with Vault Professional

CHRISTOPHER BENNER: All right. Welcome, everybody. This is Managing Your Properties with Vault Professional. I am Chris. You see on the list that Mike is listed, also. At the last minute, Mike was unable to attend AU for personal reasons, so I am going to be your host as-- I'm going to do the best I can by myself, here. I had to kind of rewrite the class over the last two days to become a one person class, but I think I've got it pretty manageable at this point.

So with that, what we're going to talk about today is basically managing your properties in Vault Professional. I was thinking this morning as I was going through my demos-- I had just walked out of a VR class, and I've been in some Inventor classes, and I thought, you know, there is really nothing sexy about what I'm going to talk about today. This is what I meant when I said it a few minutes ago.

Data management is not exciting and sexy and flashy. There's not going to be a whole lot of ooh and ah moments in what I'm going to show you, but I'm hoping that I can plant the seed. And you'll go back home and think, you know what? Maybe I can use some of this. Maybe there's a thing or two here that I can use in my organization that's going to help me out.

What I want to have you achieve by the end of this class is, first of all, where to just find the properties involved, how to get to it, knowing the difference between system properties and user defined properties, how to map properties to and from your CAD data, so that you can push or extract information from your CAD files, and then what to do with all of that. What are you going to use it for? I mean, it's one thing to know how to map these properties and how to find these properties, but then what are you going to do with that information? So we're going to talk about-- I'm going to actually show you some real examples of how I use it back home at my company.

Who am I? I'm the CAD manager at Powell Fabrication and Manufacturing in St. Louis, Michigan-- not St. Louis, Missouri. We are in the exact center of Michigan's lower peninsula. 20 plus years of CAD experience, including 10 years with Inventor and about 11 years with Vault. I'm an Autodesk Expert Elite, a blogger. I hang out on social media platforms, the Autodesk forums-- these guys know I'm in there all the time.

And if you've taken any of my classes before at AU, you know that I don't usually put Michigan up here on my thing. I usually have a Detroit Lions logo. I've kind of given up on them. So right now, I have a daughter who's a graduate student at Michigan, so for at least this one year, go blue. I don't know what would be up there next year. We'll find out. Cleveland? Yeah, Cleveland Browns.

This is home for me. I'm very fortunate to live on a beautiful man-made lake in the center of Michigan. This picture was taken earlier this spring, after some gorgeous thunderstorms rolled through. I am a semi-professional, amateur, play-around-with-it photographer. I like to take pictures of sunsets like that.

I work for Powell Fabrication. We manufacture skid-mounted chemical processing equipment for, mainly, the chloralkali industry, but not limited just to that industry. So you can see I'm obviously an Inventor too, and pipe guy. And we use Vault to manage all of our data.

This is Mike's slide. He was going to introduce himself I'm just going to-- he's a Canadian. Oh, I held it too long. All right.

Well, we're going to talk about property management in Vault. I decided that I don't want to just throw a bunch of slides at you. I can show you all kinds of things on slides, but I would much rather show you in the software how to actually do this, all right?

Slides, to me, they can be pretty boring. So I'm going to go through a few really quickly. And more than anything else, these slides are intended to just tell you what I'm going to do with the class.

So what are Vault properties? They are attributes that are associated with your data in the Vault. There are editable attributes. There are things that you can manage, and you can use them to, like I said earlier, push and extract data to and from your CAD files for whatever uses you find for them. They can be associated with files, with items, change orders, folders, and custom items in the Vault. You can have properties on all of that data.

System properties are those that are defined by Vault. They are out-of-the-box. And actually, there are some user-defined properties that are out-of-the-box as well, but most of those are going to be defined by you. Or by your Vault admin if you are not the admin.

We're going to break this class down into a couple of different steps. I'm going to show you some of the administrative tasks involved-- how to set up, how to find and edit and create properties, how to map properties. And then I'm going to show you some of the user tasks, both in Vault Client and in some of the CAD applications.

I was going to show-- actually, Mike was going to show some AutoCAD, we're not going to be able to really do that. So it's going to focus more on Inventor, but I may mention a few of the things you can do in AutoCad. I just don't have it set up on this computer.

In the administrative tasks, what I'm kind of looking is I'm going to show you how to create, edit, and delete properties from the properties grid. I'm going to show you how to get to the properties grid. Tools, Administration, Vault Settings, Behaviors, Properties. You're going to get that memorized in your head, if you don't already have it there. We're going to show you how to map properties to files and items, how to assign properties to Vault files, items, and using your categories, how to assign properties to change orders, how to set up BOM row properties, and we're going to look at the data card configuration for Inventor.

So with that, I'm just going to get right into the software and start digging in. So like I said, not a whole lot of really exciting flashy stuff that you're going to see here. There's not going to be any fancy models and spinning around. It's going to be a lot of tables.

I'm going to start inside of Vault Professional. This is Vault Professional 2018.1. I didn't have time to upgrade, [? Irvin. ?] Sorry. What, it's been two days? [LAUGHS]

So how many of you are already using Vault? Everyone in the room? Most of you on 2018? No, 2017? Raise your hands. How about 2016 or below? OK. A lot of this is going to be the same, I think. I don't think there's really been any major changes in properties management, so even if you're on a lower version, what I'm going to show is still going to be applicable to what you're doing.

So first thing is, where are the properties? Where do you get to them? And like I said, you're going to have this path memorized before too long. It's going to be Tools, Administration, Vault Settings, and then Behaviors, Properties. It's a lot of clicks, but after you've done it about six or seven times, you just do it without even looking.

And this is the properties grid that opens up. This is actually the out-of-the-box properties grid. I haven't done anything to this one yet. This is what it's going to look like the first time you open up Vault. It's just a listing of all the properties that are in the system right out of the box.

As you go across the top here, you've got the property name, the data type that is associated with it. Is it text? Is it a date? Is it a Boolean function? Is it a number? And you can control that on your user-defined properties. On the system properties, that's pretty much locked in.

You can see the state of a property, whether it's enabled or disabled. If it's disabled, you won't be able to use it. That is a good way to hide a property that has been in use in the past, so you can't delete it, but you can disable it. True.

You can associate your properties with the different types of data in the Vault, as I said earlier, files, items, folders. And this Associations column will show you, for each property, what those associations that are already in place. It'll show you the file categories, the item categories.

And I wanted to show you that these columns, just like most Windows programs, these columns are customizable. By right clicking the column header and using Customized View, you can add fields to the columns. You can remove fields from the columns. You can set this window up however you want it to appear. Whatever data is most important to you, you can show that on the window.

The other way I want to show you to remove a column, if you want to get it off of there, is, again, like most Windows programs, you can grab it and drag it down. And when you see the x appear, that column will be removed from your table. So that's totally up to you which information you want to show you in this table.

So with that, you have up at the top a toolbar that allows you to create a new property definition, to edit existing property definitions, to delete property definitions that you're no longer using. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't delete them if they're in use somewhere in the Vault. That's what the disable is for. And you can, if you want, get a count on where and how many times that property is being used.

So with that, I'm going to just go ahead and create a new property. I've got a list of notes up here so I don't forget anything. So let's see. We're going to create a new property. I'm going to create one called Rev Approved. This is something I'm going to use later, so I've got a very specific definition I wanted to set up.

I am going to associate this property with both files and items. Now, when you click the top section on file or item, you're associating it with all of the different ones that fall underneath that. So if I click File, it's picking all of those file categories.

The same thing with the items. You can be more specific. You can uncheck item and say I want just documents under items if that's the case, or just electrical. But if you click the very top just items, you're getting everything. It's going to associate with everything under there.

So I'm going to associate that with file and item. And then I am going to create a mapping for that. Now, a mapping is a way of telling this property what it's going to do when you send it out into the world. I'm going to associate it with a specific property on a CAD file.

And the key to that is you have to have a file somewhere either in Vault or on your file system that has the corresponding property on it so you have something to map it to. You can't just map it off into space. So what I like to do is if I'm going to be setting up some Inventor properties, I'll open up in Inventor drawing. And I'll just create some custom iProperties on that file and just save it.

Sometimes I'll check it into the Vault. If you're going to associate it with items, you have to have it checked into the Vault. If you're going to do with files, it can be either in the Vault or in your file system. But those properties have to exist on a CAD file somewhere so there's a two-way communication between them.

Just so happens I already have some CAD files already set up with that property on there. So I'm going to go ahead and create a mapping. Click the Mapping tab. And where it says Click Here to Add New Mapping, I'm just going to select that. My entity is going to be a file.

You have to decide what type of document is your provider. In my case, that is an Inventor file. And now, I have to pick the property I want to associate it with.

And I'm going to import those properties. You choose, are you going to import it from a Vault file, or from one that's out on your file system somewhere? So I'm going to go to Import From File. And I'm going to select this drawing that I have handy and available.

And a list of all the available properties on that Inventor file comes up. And I can pick which one of those files I want to associate this property with. So we're going to create a two-way street between them here.

I don't have it on the Inventor file. Bear with me one moment. I'm going to create that. This is what happens if you get in here and you find out you don't have the property in your CAD file. You just go back to the CAD file and create it. Come on.

And why am I not typing? Because it's not checked out, that's why. Apologize for this. Go back to Properties, Custom, and I want to create the same property on here. I don't care about the capitalization. Save it. And I'm going to go back to Vault.

And now, I'm going to try again. I'm going to Import From File. Select that file. And this property should be there. Guess what? I'm sorry. What's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] type that value in the Value instead of the name.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Did I? I apologize. You see, I've already thrown myself off. This is something Mike would have helped me with. I did. I typed it in the value. Good catch, guys.

AUDIENCE: We all passed the first test.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: You all passed the first test. Everybody aced the class. All right. It is in my list, Rev Approved. OK. Save that. Go back to Vault.

And let's try this one more time. Import From File. There it is. Rev Approved.

So now, I'm going to be able to create a two-way street between the property involved and the property on my file. So I select that property. It is a text property. I'm not going to change the type. It is a custom property.

And now, here's the decision you have to make. If this is a custom property, you can decide, do I want to have Vault create that property on my CAD file if it isn't already there? In this case, I'm going to say yes, because if that Rev Approved is not already on my file, I want it there so Vault will create it for me. So I'm going to go ahead and say yes on that.

And I can choose what direction I want to map this. I can have it go bidirectionally from Vault to my file, or if I can have it go just from the file to the Vault, or just from the Vault to the file. In this particular case, I like to have two-way mapping on this type of property. So I'm going to leave that going in both directions. And I'm going to hit OK.

And then I want to create another mapping on that for an item. So I'm going to select Create New Mapping, Item. And before I go any further, I'm going to make sure I check this sucker in and get it in there. Because you saw that I didn't have the property on there in the first place.

No DWF. That's all right. I don't care about a DWF. And I'm going to cancel this. And I'm going to update that item. Update. OK. So that should be there. Let's hope this works.

Tools, Administration, Vault Settings, Behaviors, Properties. You do that so many times you just get used to it. So where is my Rev Approved? Let's try this with the item. Same provider. It's going to be an Inventor file.

File Property, Import. This time I only have one option because I'm doing an item so I have to import it from the Vault. I have to find that file in the Vault. And there's my bearing mount.

Now, if I did all of this right, my Rev Approved should be there. And it's not. Any ideas why that didn't work, Irvin?

AUDIENCE: You didn't associate it to the category?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Hm?

AUDIENCE: Did you associate it to the category?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: I believe I did. Let me check that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: It should be in there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Hm?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Why isn't that working? All right. Document, Properties. It is not associated. Is that what I'm missing? Let's try that again. I'm going to give it one more try, and I'm going to skip over it. I'm starting to miss Mike right now.

OK. Mapping, Item, Inventor, Import From Vault. And it's still not in there. Well, we're going to skip over that at this point in time.

But you can see how the mapping is done. If that property were in the list, I would select it and do the same thing I did with the file. I would go through and hit the dual directional mapping. And I would say yes, create it if it's not already there.

So rather than fighting with it, I'm just going to move on from there. I've got my file mapping. And I'm going to move on to the next step.

I'm going to take two more of my properties, and I'm going to give them a try. I've got title and subject that I want to map to my files for something else I'm going to try to do later on. See, these are already mapped. It looks like they are all mapped to files.

Let's try an item. Can't do an item. I got to change my association. Notice its only set to a file. Let's associated that with items. Check the box on the what?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Didn't I? Yeah, I did.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Want me to check all of these? We'll check them all. How's that?

We're going to go to Inventor. And we're going to pick the properties I have to import. I'm going to change. This is still reading the previous drawing that I had looked at. So I'm going to change the data file to-- well, let's stick with the same one. Let's see if they're in this one.

There is title. So I'm going to associate that. And as a standard, I'm going to go ahead and say create if it doesn't exist, although I know that this particular property does exist on every Inventor file. So I won't need to create it there.

And I'm going to do the same thing with subject, mapping. And I need to do my same associations again. New mapping to an item. Provider is going to be Inventor again.

And let's find subject in the list here. There she is. And the same thing, I'm going to say yes, even though I know a subject is on all of my Inventor files.

So that's essentially how you would create these mappings. And you're just literally creating a link between the CAD file and the Vault data. Did you?

AUDIENCE: So that is on the create?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Hm mm.

AUDIENCE: It's going to create the property on other files that don't have?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: On that section where I said create yes. Yeah, on the drawings that I have set up, I already put that property there. Or on the one I showed you, I had to go back and create that property.

But yes, if I open up a new drawing in Inventor, and my template doesn't have that property in it, once I do an Update Properties from the Vault, which I'm going to show you later, that property will be created.

AUDIENCE: As a custom?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: As a custom property, yes. And the same is true with AutoCAD. Even though I don't have AutoCAD on here to show you that, AutoCAD does have the custom drawing properties. It'll work the same way. It will create those custom drawing properties and then push whatever the value of that property is out to your drawing. And there's a lot of really cool uses in AutoCAD for that, that if I have time at the end, I'm going to talk about a few of them, but I can't demonstrate it, unfortunately. I was hoping I'd be able to do that.

AUDIENCE: But it should be [INAUDIBLE] time. Right?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Yes.

AUDIENCE: It should [INAUDIBLE] all the time? I mean, it doesn't work.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: For a custom property, I usually do pick yes just to make sure because I might be working with older drawings that don't already have that property on them.

So that's essentially what you want to do for mapping the properties. You do have to have the property on a file, either in the Vault or in your file system. That's the key thing to remember. Obviously, I wasn't able to map it because I didn't have it on my Inventor file.

So now, as we kind of already saw, I'm going to assign some properties to files and/or items using the categories. So I'm going to get out of this window. And I'm going to jump into Edit and Manage Categories. And my primary item category is this Document category. So I'm going to edit that.

I don't want to edit the color. What are you doing? I'm going to use Properties, Assign. And I don't have a whole lot of them available because this is a new Vault. And I have created a bunch of them. But just to show you how it's done, these are the properties that are already associated with that category in the Vault. I can remove any of those from the list, or I can add any of the ones that are over here on the left. I'm going to just take this length property and add it to the list.

So now, on my Items, length is a property that's available to me. I'm not going to remove any. I don't want to remove any at this point.

And the same is true with files. I'm going to go to File Categories and choose my base category. Properties, Assign. I've got a few more that I can pick from on this. And there's already quite a good list that's assigned to that category.

So I can add. Let's just add some of these revision properties that I created. So I have those available on my files. And let's throw length in there, too, just for good measure.

So now, that's all it takes to assign a property to a category. And then any file that is created in that category will have those properties on it in the Vault.

All right. What was next? Assigning properties to change orders. I wanted to show you a little bit on that as well.

If you're using Vault Professional, and if you have the change order system, you can do the same thing, essentially. There's a couple of different ways to do that. Administration, Vault Settings, Change Orders.

What I like to do is there are some properties that I want to have right on the change order screen that are unique to each item in the change order. The one that I use is called Assigned To. I just create a custom property in my system called Assigned To. And then I put that on my change orders so that anybody who is looking at the change order system can see which one of us is working on a specific project.

You know, as the CAD manager, I get the requests from my engineers. And I assign them to different people in my department to do the actual CAD work. Well, the engineer may want to find out which one of us has gotten his project after it's been started. So that's a good way for them to just jump into the change order and look at it. And it's right there on the screen in front of them.

So I'm going to do that in the Properties screen here. New. It looks a lot like the properties creation that we saw in the main grid. We want to give it a name. So we're going to create Assigned To.

And there are some settings that you can set down here. I'm going to create a list of values. And I like to do this because I can put all of the designers' names in this list. And when I assign a job, I simply go to the pull-down and grab whichever person's going to work on it and drop that name in.

To do that, you just go into the list, click the down arrow. And here is a Click Here to Add New Row. There's none out of the box, so you have to start with a blank screen. And I'm going to put my name in as the first one.

And even though he's not here, I'm going to go ahead and assign Mike Thomas. And just because he is here and being a pain, I'm going to assign Mike Davis. Mike's been harassing me all week at AU, so is this my revenge.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: A predefined list? No, you have to create the list. Yeah. It would be nice if I could just read the list of Vault users. But right now, you have to just go ahead and type those names in.

AUDIENCE: Idea Station.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Idea Station, yes. It's a good one for the Idea Station. So we'll close that out.

And now, if I create a new change order, close, close, I'll go to my change order list and go to New. I've got to figure out where to put it. Where is it?

All right, Irvin, what didn't I do? I didn't assign. What didn't I do? Why isn't it showing up on the change order? Those are manual adds. I've done this before. How do I do that? You're going to have to walk me through this.

AUDIENCE: Go back into the change order.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Go back into the change order. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Yep.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: There we go. No, I have nothing in there.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, save the change order.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Save the change order. Actions. That's all I've got. Nothing there. Yeah, I've got to remember this too. I've done this, but I've done it like three years ago.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Let's add a file to it. Too many workflows here. Yes, you are correct about that. Actions. There is no property. All right. We're going to come back to this one. Normally, it would be right here, right down in this bottom section.

While we wait on that, I wanted to show you the next one was going to be adding a property to a BOM row. So if you are using items, if you're using the BOM on the items, Bill of Materials tab, if you've got this opened up, you can add properties to this list in here and/or remove properties from that if you don't want to use them.

To do that, I am going to try to remember how. I apologize, people. It's been a long day. Hm? Yeah.

I'm going back to it. Configure settings for BOM rows. Properties. Where is that? I thought it was right in here. Settings for BOM rows? No, that's not it. I just did this morning. I swear I just did just this--

AUDIENCE: Maybe if you right-click on the [INAUDIBLE].

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: You can, but that would only add it to that one. There's a way to associate a property to all of your BOMs. Here we go. That's what we've got to do.

I'm going to use that length property that I've been playing around with on some of my others. I'm going to go in and edit that. And I'm going to change the association to bill of material row. I need to disassociate it with that. Disassociate it with that. And then click. It's not going to let me do it. Oh, for crying out loud. Hm?

AUDIENCE: Mess around with your files.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Mess around with my files?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BENNER: That is not working. All of this worked this morning. Nope, that is not working. Well, this does not look good. It is just simply not working. OK, people. Let's try this. Mike, do you have any ideas?

AUDIENCE: What?

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Nevermind.

AUDIENCE: No, I'm sorry. I looked down at something else.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: OK. We can try Customized View. I can't get the BOM row. And that property is not even available to me.

You can add any properties that are in this list, yes, using the available fields. So if we wanted to move that over there, we can do that. And that'll show up. But I don't know why I can't get that length property.

OK. Moving right along. Let's go to data cards. Anybody using data cards in Inventor? No one. All right.

That is under Behaviors also, right underneath Properties. Data cards in Inventor are actually very easy to set up. You just simply grab from the list of available properties and drag them over to the data card itself.

You can add as many pages to the data card as you want. This is just all a different way of editing properties inside of the Inventor environment by making them all available to you in one spot.

Just for an example, we are going to add Engineering Approved. And we're going to add Manufacturing Approved to our data card. And we're going to add some of the revision properties I used earlier.

I can multi shift and add those. So now, all of these will appear on my data card when I go over to Inventor and look at them there. Very simple to set that up.

And other than the things that did not work, that was what I was going to show you for the admin tasks. Now, I want to show you some of the things that as users you will do to edit these properties.

I'm going to go into my Project Explorer where I've got all my files. And over here on the right, I have what's known as the Properties Grid. This will show you both your system properties and your user-defined properties that are associated with any particular file.

So if I select this bearing mount, you can see there are a number of system properties that were associated with that. And there are a number of user properties that are associated with that. I like to close this area down so I can see my user-defined properties a little bit better.

So to edit these properties on here, there's a number of different ways to do that. You can select the file and use Control E. And that's going to open the default Property Edit window. And out of the box, it comes with these two properties on it. That's it. So any other properties that you want to edit for that file, you go to Select Properties. And you pick from the list of available properties that are associated with that file type.

So for this example, let's put in Engineer and Designer. Simply add them to the list. The description's in there already. That's fine. Let's do Designer. And now, those are going to show up in my editing grid.

To edit a property, you just click in the window and change the text. Let's put Mike Davis as the creator of this one. It's full of mistakes, and I want to make sure that his name's on it.

You can change the description that goes along with it. You can change any of the properties that you've added to the list. So for Engineer, let's put Mike Thomas, just to have a name in there.

When you're done editing, you simply select OK. And it's going to tell you which ones were successful, what it changed. And if you want, you can get a report of this and print that off. I've never used that. I don't really see a whole lot of value to it, but some people may.

Now, in that same window, go back to Control E, you can also add files to your selection from this point. I've picked one file that I want to edit the properties on. Now, maybe I realized I want to add a couple files to this that I want to edit the properties for. So I'm going to select the part as well that goes along with that.

And now, I can edit these properties together. If I want to make Mike the author on both of these, I can simply copy and paste that information. And if you have a long list, that's a quick way to change a bunch of properties. Set the properties maybe in your first row. If you're editing two or three dozen files, you can simply highlight the rest of the rows and Control V, and you're done.

And then also, if you're editing a list of files and you realize there are some in there that you didn't want, you can do the same thing. You can select a file and remove it from that list, and you're no longer editing the properties on that list.

There's also a search and replace function in here for text string. If you want to find it on one file and replace all the rest, very handy to use. Very similar to like Word or Excel or any of the other text editing programs you might work with.

And you can also search for a text string. Find out where that is. If you know it's a property or there's a value on one of those files in a long list, you might use this find to just drill down to that particular file.

You can also edit these properties over here in the Properties Grid. You see they're right here in front of us. We can select a file or a group of files. Let's select these two files. Notice a lot of the properties now say various because I'm looking at more than one file.

If I want to edit, for example, the title on both of those files, you can do that with the Control E. That's going to bring back up the same-- excuse me. File, Edit. Where is it

OK. I lied to you. Here it is. Edit Properties. It's going bring up the same window we had before. So you really haven't done anything different than what I just did before.

Or you can select this little icon over here with Edit Selected Properties. So now, on these two files that I have in my list, I'm only going to be editing title. So if I hit Edit Selected Properties, it's narrowed that property editing window down to just the one or the group of properties that I've selected in the Properties Grid.

Another really quick way to change one value on a whole bunch of files. I use that one a lot when I'm changing my revision properties. And again, it will give me a report of what worked and what didn't work. So that's a quick way to know when you're changing a bunch of properties, did I get everything. Did I miss a couple? Did it not work for some reason? It gives you a chance to go back and troubleshoot it.

You get something for me?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Item Master, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Yep. OK. I've only got one. This fine now? Oh, yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Gotcha. See, I'm glad you're in here, Irvin. OK. Records.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Yes, that's what I was looking for. Yep. There it is. That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

So there's my assigned to that I want to put on this change order. So now I can put somebody's name in this list. And if there was more than one record, I could put another person on the second item. So if I've got maybe a dozen items or records in this change order that need to be worked on, I don't have to assign them all to one person.

I can choose from that list and have Mike do all the hard ones. And I'll take the easy ones, or something like that. Cause that's just the way I roll. Right?

So that's how that works. It was probably there before, and I just didn't notice it. Let's save that change order. And let's go back. Block item.

All right. I'm going to go back to my Item Master now. And I'm going to open up this item. And here are some of the properties that are associated with this item. You can do the same thing here.

You can click the Edit. And you can edit these properties for the item right on the item screen itself. And then this, again, will be information that I can push out to a drawing.

I can choose from my name. Oh, I've got Mark in there too. We'll put Mark's name on that one. And we'll say that this revision is as built. How's that? That simple.

So those properties are associated with that. And I can now edit them on there. I wanted to add a property to that I thought. There we go.

To add more properties to this item, I'm going to come down to Actions, Add or Remove Property, and I'm going to grab my Rev Approved that I created earlier because I want to be able to edit that on this item as well and put in the name of the engineer.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Didn't I hit it? I thought I did. Come one. Rev Approved. There we go. Add. I thought I clicked that. There she is.

So now, I can assign an engineer's name to that. And let's call this IHayes. You just approved this change order.

So there, I've just added more properties to this item. Edited the values in here. And I can save it and close it.

And all of that information is available to me. When I do an Update Properties on the CAD file associated with this item, that information should be pulled down to the CAD file.

Where I would use something like that would be-- let's jump to Inventor. I've got my revision block set up on this drawing. Now, in here, let's check this out. Make sure I've got it checked out before I do anything. If I go to my Model tab and My Properties. Yes.

In my Custom Properties, those values are already there. So even though I've got that create yes, it's not going to create them on this file because they're already in there. But watch what happens to my revision block when I go to Vault, Update Properties. Seriously. Seriously. Mike, stop laughing.

All right. Did I edit the wrong one in Vault? No, bearing mount. What are you laughing at, Mike?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Of course you did. All right. I have my properties on there. Update. Save and Close. I should be able to do this. Are these all mapped? Let's check my mappings. Vault Settings, Behaviors, Properties.

We know that Rev Approved was on there because I just did that one. I did associate it. I did not do an item. Import from Vault, Inventor, Data Files, Bearing Mount.

And this was the one I could not get to show up earlier. Snowballing. I have no idea why that property is not showing up in there. No ideas.

AUDIENCE: Is it associated to all the [INAUDIBLE]?

CHRISTOPHER BENNER: Yes. Yes. Let's find out.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Edit what?

AUDIENCE: Edit your mapping. Go back into Properties.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Edit my mapping again. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Go into your Associations.

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Associations file and item.

AUDIENCE: Associate them to [INAUDIBLE].

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: Let's put them all in. How's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: It's just not there. What's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHRISTOPHER BRENNER: OK. Yeah, that should be working. That's how I do it at work. All right. We're going to try Update Properties one more time.

Since it's not working, I'll just show you what's in the Update Properties dialog box. You can include children. You can include parents. You can choose whether you want just direct parents, or you can uncheck all of these if you want.

You can change the way you're looking at this. You can change it from a table to a list. And when you hit OK, it should just update this table.

I'm going to double check this and make sure that my columns are mapped properly. I'm going to go to my Custom Properties. They're not available. So we're going to create that.

Let's try just Description. And let's see what happens when I update that. Nope. Yeah, this just isn't work very good this morning. So I'm not going to fight with it too much longer.

Let's show you the data cards since that seems to be working. We created those data cards in the Vault. But when you open it up in your Inventor, this is what you're going to see the very first time is these four properties, a thumbnail, and then whatever value is associated there. If you expand that, we should see the properties that I added in the Vault to this data card.

If you had added multiple pages, you would see that there would be several tabs along the bottom here with different groupings of properties. It's a good way to group properties that are similar so that you can edit, for example, maybe page one would be all of your revision properties. Maybe page two would be properties that you want to associate into your title block or something along those lines.

To edit them, you simply click the Edit button. And you can change the values of these right here in this screen. And just change whatever is associated with those.

So if I want to change the engineering approved by, I could change that to MThomas. And then that value will be applied when I click Apply. You're going to get the same results screen that you got in the Vault telling you that it was successful or not. And there you go.

So that's how you use the data cards inside of Inventor. What I was going to talk about with AutoCAD, and I can't show you, but I think is very, very cool is-- do have a lot of AutoCAD users? A lot of people that use AutoCAD? How many of you are aware of the Insert Field in your text strings? That is a great tool.

Any text in AutoCAD, including attributes, there is a tool called Insert Field. You can highlight that text, right click, and there should be an Insert field in your context menu. Now, a field will be associated to a property.

Usually, it's going to be one of those custom drawing properties. It may be one of the system drawing properties. There's going to be a whole list of properties available to you when you use that Insert Field. This works in blocks. It works in just plain text.