Can a WVS publishing filter be setup to exclude all ECAD Documents ?

[NickD]

Can a WVS publishing filter be setup to exclude all ECAD Documents, or at least the ones from Authoring Application = Mentor Graphics Design Capture, Expedition or DxDesigner, which use client-side publishing. We need to do this as the ECAD viewables are deleted during Promotion workflows which have already been setup to republish MCAD files after approval (using file-sync enabled cadworkers) as part of server-side publishing ?

I have found a few clues, but need more specific step-by-step help on how to implement such a filter, eg.

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS210431

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS115536

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS229067

The third of these CS documents (with example code "not supported by PTC") mentions filtering out some EPMDocuments from publishing based on some criteria. For example a certain lifecycle state, EPMDocumentType, EPMDocSubType, etc,  - and this sounds like it could filter out ECADDocuments , but there is no specific example given for filtering by sub-types, and as it is "unsupported" I doubt that PTC will be willing to tell us how to do this, but I have logged a support call with our VAR to ask anyway !

I had a quick look in the chapter 'About Publish Rules' in the PTC Windchill Visualization Services Guide v10.2 M030, and it does not appear to have any ECAD applications that can be used in Publishing Rules.  Hunting around in the file wvs.properties we can see various settings, some of which are defaults and some are as a result of entries in site.xconf file.　There are some entries that suggest ECAD Authoring Applications may be recognised, but does anyone know if Publish Rules can be set for any of these : MENTORE, MENTORE_SCH, MENTORD or more generally just ECAD ?

thanks in anticipation,

Nick

[NickD]

Oops, I wrote too soon... so I have amended this posting (22-Apr-2017)

Thanks to PTC and our VAR for providing some information to supplement CS229067 - but unfortunately it is not complete, yet.

We have tried to setup a WVS filter to exclude the file extensions .pcb, .prj and .zip in all Containers and some Lifecycle states.  With this filter in place ECAD viewables that were created on the client-side during ECAD check-in, that are already converted to Representation/thumbnails are preserved during ordinary non-ECAD check-in events, Set-State, Promote and Revise transitions (both manual and in Workflows) - BUT the same filter also prevents any new ECAD viewables that may be created during subsequent ECAD Check-ins from being converted to Representation/thumbnails by the automatic server-side publishing.

As per the CS, we have set the property publish.republishonepmdocumentchange to true, but we used to have it set to false - so this meant we had to alter some other property values to control the behaviour of our MCAD cadworkers.  I have done this by following the clues given in CS16610 and CS52697, which help explain how some of the wvs.properties interact with each other.  In particular, setting the property publish.promote.enabled=true can/will trigger a publishing event upon the creation of the Promotion Request rather that at the completion of the Workflow, and whilst I can see why this might be useful it is not what we want, so I have set that property to false, and instead set publish.service.readytopublish.enabled=true in order to get the WVS filter not to interfere with MCAD, but we still can't get it working for ECAD as suggested by CS229067.

So we find ourselves stuck once again, as either :

- with the filter set, the existing ECAD viewables get carried forward during Promotion Workflows, but no new ones can be published from the PVZ files uploaded as Attachments, or

- without the filter set, the ECAD viewables get lost during Promotion Workflows, but the new PVZ files that are created during ECAD Check-in do get published as Representations !

Arrgghh !

[mdigman]

Hi Nick,

Did you ever get this sorted out, as I have the same issues. We are looking at adding ECAD to our Windchill system, but the publishing rules don't give all the control we would like.

We republish on Promotion Requests and Set States because our MCAD drawings create PDFs as well, and those have watermarks based on the state. With the client side creating the viewables for ECAD, this creates a problem.

Thanks,

Micah