For the 2010 Vault Family of Products, Autoloader has some signifcant improvements. These enhanced features will make bulk loading data into your Vault easier, allowing you to get up and running quicker with your Vault implementation.
Direct Folder Mapping
If you are uploading an Autodesk Inventor project, the workspace, libraries, and content center library in the project need to be mapped to folders in the vault. The workspace folder can be mapped directly to the Designs folder in the vault or to any subfolder in the Designs folder. Libraries can be mapped directly to the Libraries folder in the vault or to any subfolder in the Libraries folder. However, Content Libraries are automatically mapped to the vault Content Center Files folder.
In the Browse Vault for Folder dialog box, select either the Designs folder or a subfolder to be mapped to the workspace for the project. This will create a subfolder called Designs under the Designs folder. To map the workspace folder directly to the Designs folder without creating a subfolder, select the Direct Mapping check box.
User Preferences
Duplicates – ‘Find duplicate files during scan’ option, checked by default, enables collecting both duplicate and dependency information during scan; otherwise, only dependency information will be provided. The following duplicate searching criteria can be specified under Settings…:
Threshold - Specify a threshold limit to the number of files for scanning to allow halting when the limit has been reached. This number is set at 5,000 by default. User may choose to increase/ decrease this number to a minimum of 1 and maximum of 999,999 files.
Scan Status
Stop Scan
A new ‘Stop’ button has been introduced in the Autoloader’s toolbar to facilitate the user to stop the scanning process without exiting the Autoloader application.
The Status frame stops updating when the scanning process is halted. It will be left as it was when the user stops the scanning process. Remaining files will still be checked and subjected for rescanning in a subsequent Scan.
If the user clicks ‘No’ in the above Warning prompt, the scanning process resumes from where it was halted and the Status frame continues to process the status counts.
Offline Usage
File scanning can now be performed without a connection to the Vault. Logging in to the Vault has now been deferred until a connection to the Vault is required.
In the 2010 release, the login/logout command is available in the ‘Map Vault Folders’ page of the Autoloader wizard (i.e. after successful scanning).
Multiple Instances of Autoloader
Previously, multiple Autoloader instances were prevented from running on different machines at the same time. This was enforced by each Autoloader’s instance attempting to check out the BUU.xml file on the server after user had signed in during Autoloader's Welcome stage. Users are blocked from proceeding if this file was already checked out by other Autoloader's instances (or other Vault clients).
BUU.xml file is a system file (hidden by default) located at the root folder of Vault ($). To display it, select Tools > Options > Show hidden files.
· BUU.xml will not be checked out unless during the first run of Autoloader whereby users choose to have different workspace and/or library folder name than the default ones.
Hot Tip: A user, usually the administrator, will setup the BUU.xml file by running Autoloader once on a server. During the session, the user may choose to customize both the Design and Library folder names during the “Map Vault Folders” steps. The BUU.xml file is then updated with the latest folder names. After this initial session, multiple Autoloader instances will be able to run concurrently.
NOTE: If users want to run Autoloader concurrently on different machines, it is their responsibility to ensure that the datasets to be uploaded do not overlap else some, or all, of the files might not be able to be uploaded successfully. The usage assumption is made based on the fact that Autoloader users are either power-users or given certain administrative privileges.
It is the user’s responsibility to ensure that they do not add in or remove reference file(s); files already scanned will have their results invalidated if any of these reference file(s) are manipulated.
Open File from Autoloader
This feature is to provide the ability for the user to open any files from user’s dataset during the ‘Data Scan & Report’ stage.
The primary purpose of this feature is to allow the user to resolve the document and its dependency links within the appropriate CAD application. However, this feature shall not be limited to CAD files as users may also use this feature to view files using the registered applications (i.e. .DOC, .TXT files… etc).
Reporting
After triggering the ‘Scan>’ or ‘Find Duplicates’, the user can choose to export report by clicking ‘Export’ in the toolbar.
If the export is successful, the export button in toolbar is disabled.
If there are no problematic files, the option “Only Displayed Problem Files” will be disabled and ‘All Displayed Files’ is automatically selected.
Note: Duplicate files are not categorized as ‘Problem Files’.
In the 2010 release, a new report file type (XML file format) is available for user selection; it has been set as the default file format.
-Brian Schanen
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