Our Vault expert Adam is back again with another tutorial on Vault Autoloader where he explains how to upload multiple files to your Vault. Vault Autoloader is now part of the Vault Client, previously part of the vault server application but now is being rolled out to client users.
This function allows you the user to upload large quantities of CAD data to your Vault using the Vault Autoloader. This method will retain links between Inventor assemblies and parts. In AutoCAD external references are also retained, and functional within the Vault environment.
You begin by clicking start and type in Autoloader and then select 2021 Autoloader. This is a very useful tool for uploading large quantities of data to your vault, then you click next and select folder, this is a large sample set that you are allowing in here. You will then be asked to allow inventor project file. The exclamation mark here will indicate project files which are found within the folder that you are choosing from.
Then you need to scan all your files, so Autoloader doesn’t allow you upload files with broken links so for instance if you have an AutoCAD drawing with an x ref to another AutoCAD drawing that’s missing or an x ref to an image that’s missing you are going to have issues getting those files into Vault using this Autoloader method.
Additionally the same works with parts and if you have an Inventor assembly that’s made up of 10 parts and one of those parts is missing, you either need to modify the assembly to remove that missing part or you need to find that part and then put it in the expectant folder location.
Next you will run a scan and for this example there is almost 2,000 drawings here and we just need to wait until that is complete. The Autoloader scan is now complete and for this example you can see 89 errors and 33 warnings. The errors are the ones that are issues and won’t be able to get into the Vault.
Normally these will be sorted by file name or folder name, but you can sort them by status here too which is a useful feature. Issues in children will be the most common error and you will also get duplicates found. You can also get issues where a file might be an old version and if that’s the case you just must open the file and save it up to a newer, current version of Inventor or AutoCAD or whatever the application is.
In this example the common one here is “issues in children”. From assembly you can look down on the bottom window where you can expand and see where the issue is coming from so in this example the it’s obvious that we have an assembly that is made up of three-part files. One of these part files has reference to two bmp map images. These two images are linked to this file, but they are not existing in the folder structure that is already in place. They have either been moved or deleted or they are basically gone.
In this case when I open this file, I get an error saying there are broken links or parts of this file is missing and in this case there is two images. To upload all this data to Vault, you can run an export report and export your issues, to do this you can use Microsoft excel. You will need to remove the broken links or delete them or choose not to bring them into Vault. In this example we are going to manually remove the couple of errors and then you will see that you we are now down to the files that didn’t actually have the errors, at this point we are just going to click next and this is just going to upload these 1695 files, then if I click next, you will be asked to log into a Vault in particular and in this case I am just going to log into my test Vault.
Then it is going to do is ask you what folders you want to put this data into. Ideally your data folder structure is set up so what you are really doing is putting that folder structure and its entirety into the designs folder within a top level of your Vault. In this case we are going with Designs, you need to get designs sample file because these are the files that I am bringing in here in the first place and the standard parts they are just going to go into the content centre. Then you just click next, you get to the end of this you will just next. At this point you are asked if you want to create a visualisation for every single file or if we just want to upload them and create the visualisation afterwards so the visualisation are just previews of the images that you get in the bottom half when you are previewing the files within Vault. Really this will slow process if you do actually check this box so if you are doing a large quantity of files we recommend you upload them all in bulk and then afterwards you run a task of creating the visualisation attachment and let them jobs run on The Vault Job Processor on a separate machine later on and then next click upload. When this is finished you just click done and the autoloader dialogue box will just close and if we go back to the Vault if we just do a quick refresh, go into designs folder and into the sample files folder.
This is a folder structure that I have just uploaded, so you can see your assemblies are showing the parts. The links are still retained, and the folder structure is still retained within the Vault.
Hope you enjoyed another short Vault tutorial. We have lots of webinars coming up, don’t forget to register online for free!
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