SW03- System Options>File Locations

[MadMango]

I am wondering if there is a limit to the number of Referenced Document folders you can reference in System Options>File Locations>Folders.

I do not remember hearing of any limitations, but I don't hear everything. I am not sure if there may be a SW or Windows limitation.

The reason for this question stems from wanting to add about 50 folders to this refernce path. Before I start this little exercise, I wanted to know if someone has already tried this. "The attempt and not the deed confounds us."

 

[BBJT]

I personally am not happy with the File locations searching capabilities. You should be able to set this up per project or at least the first place it should automatically look is in the folder that the assembly is loaded from. There should also be a option to search sub-floders.

As far as your question I would assume that having 50 folders would generate a whole lot of searching everytime you needed to get something from that 50th folder. I am not sure that their is any limit on how many folders.

My 2 cents for whatever it is worth.

Bill BBJT CSWP

 

[MadMango]

Thanks for the input.

We have been struggling with our PDM software, and have half of our models in "the vault" while the rest are still in our network folders. We are attempting to "purge & clean" our files. This means getting rid of all duplicate files that our 20+ SW users have made copies of, plus renaming those files to remove revision info.

I suggested to just dump all files into a single folder since SW looks there first when opening an assy. For some reason the higher ups don't like this suggestion. They would rather use SW's File Location search strings, and add all of the locations of our folders and sub-folders on the network.

So that means I have to create search strings for A-Z folders, plus 0-9, and a few others for different folders. All-in-all, it will be close to 50. "The attempt and not the deed confounds us."

 

[macPT]

MadMango

I have been in that road before and my team as only 3 designers! I only can imagine the problems that you are having with more than 20 users!

I solved the problem having 3 folders (the 3 designers access them) on the server:

1 - one for approved drawings, parts and assemblies of components and produts currently in production
2 - one for standard parts and assemblies and "of the shelf" parts
3 - one for drawings, parts and assemblies in development or in revision state

The system options points to these folders only. No designer is allowed to have docs. in different locations than these 3 folders.

Of course, to achieve this goal, we needed to spend some hours organizing each file of each designer computer (people tend to create docs in any folder available on a computer)and from time to time I must audit the system in order to prevent problems (I allways find a file outside those folders and it seems that there was a reason for that). Another advantage is that the backup of all the files is a simple job (and done by the network administrator).

I think the solution is not pointing to 50 folders. You will have a big job creating and managing that. The problem will grow (you did not solve it - just have a turn arround). I think you should stick on your idea of having one folder (or some folders, according to your organization, but not 50 on local PC's).

Good luck

 

[MadMango]

macPT,

We have 2 network locations, one for Development and one for Production. We also have one location for standard hardware, SW templates and OEM models.

The Development location is divided into Project folders. All the SW files are located in a single sub-folder. Then we have other sub-folders, for things like Word documents, Excel, FEA results, Faxes, etc. These are easy to manage as usually only the Engineers and Designers fiddle with these files.

The Production folders are where things get messy. They have the A-Z and 0-9 sub-folders, plus History and Submitted folders that are used for our Engineering Change process. Here, we'll have SW "drafters" and Doc Control personel moving & copying files all over the place. For some reason, they'll take a top level assy and break all the sub-assys and parts into their respective A-Z folders, where they have to go back and re-link all the relations.

This is where we need to purge. Once we rename all the files (remove rev info from the file name, replaced by a custom prop in the model), we plan to rebuild all the assemblies. Once everthing has a home and is accounted for, we can put them into our PDM vault. By directing SW to search for missing files in all our various locations (via File Location searches) we hope this won't take longer than a few days. But we talking about 8k-10k files, so who knows... "The attempt and not the deed confounds us."