The Autodesk Vault 2011 family of products has made many improvements driven on user feedback regarding usability. We’ll examine property administration with the Autodesk Vault 2011 family of products.
Common Property Definitions
New for the Vault 2011 product line, utilizing a common properly definition for files, items, and change orders, the task of managing property configuration, mapping, and editing has never been easier.
The total number of property types has been greatly reduced within the Vault to a single property definition. As a result, administrators need to only define a property once and enable it within the environment that they would like to utilize it in, rather than creating multiple copies of the same property.
Property mapping has been improved as well. As administrators begin the process of defining property definitions, they may now select a file external to the vault to initialize the file property definition without having to first add a file to the Vault, making the process more intuitive. Further, property mapping may now be mapped across data types. For example, strings may be mapped to numeric property definitions and vice versa. Lastly, the default behaviors for new property definitions are to bidirectional push and pull property values between files and your vault, making it much easier to synchronize property values.
Property policies have also been improved. Administrators have more control over initial values for all user defined properties (UDP’s), ensuring that new properties on an object (a file, item, or change order) can appear with no value, a predefined static value, or a value pulled across from a file as an initial value as the object is created. Further, a new property policy has been added to the administration configuration: required value. This setting allows administrators to require users to enter a property value for any given property, regardless of data type. Finally, list values can now be generated for both string and numeric data types. Lists, when used with no initial values, the required value setting, and the new ‘Enforce List of Values’ setting, provide administrators a ensure that users are properly selecting values from predefined list properties prior to releasing design data.
Enhanced Property Interactions
Users will first find that user defined property lists are now directly available within the Advanced Search functionality, making it easier to create search criteria. Plus, wildcards may now also be used with these list properties in order to find multiple search results based on numerous list values.
A new vertical property grid has been introduced with the 2011 product family. This vertical property grid replaces the properties tab previously found within the preview panel and provides users with greater accessibility to context specific object property data. Just as property panel in the previous release, the vertical property grid displays the properties associated to the selected object along with their corresponding values. However, users are now able to select multiple objects, such as files, and see the collective property sets and their corresponding values, providing a more insight to where objects have duplicate or unique values.
Property editing has also been streamlined for files. Rather than having to step through a wizard as done with previous releases, this function has been consolidated to a single step. Users may start the feature as before and add the necessary files, or now use the new vertical properties grid to activate the feature. In fact, users may not only select multiple files to populate the vertical properties grid, but they if they have specific properties highlighted in the grid and activate the Edit Properties command, the Edit Properties dialog with pre-populate with the preselected properties of the preselected files, making it tremendously easy for users to quickly edit the intended property values.
-Brian Schanen
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