Hagerman Blog

For those using categories and assignment rules in Vault, you may have found yourself attempting to find a more detailed way of utilizing the assignment rules.  You can always utilize the file extension for assigning categories, but what if files with the same extension can exist in different categories?  You could always search on another file property, but very often they don’t exist yet and going through the process of assigning them is often more work than assigning the categories.

A few months ago my colleague Mike Space wrote about powerVault – a native PowerShell extension produced by coolOrange that can dramatically simplify interaction with the Vault API.  Today I’d like to build upon that idea by illustrating how using powerVault in conjunction with the Vault Data Standard can provide a complete solution for customizing Vault behavior.

There’s a neat ‘trick’ you can perform using Vault Data Standard (VDS) and iLogic that involves creating Engineer-To-Order (ETO)-type components.  If you have a semi-standard product line that changes based on customer spec you can use VDS to help create new iterations of those components, and even off-load the creation of those components to non-CAD users.