What role does the working directory play?

[Gavin_Lewis]

I've been using Creo at work for about 2 years now. I've never really understood the purpose of the working directory. I have never changed changed the working directory. I have it set to a random folder in my documents. 

My coworker recently said that he was told to always set the working directory the the folder your files are in. Is this what I should do? Why? 

[tbraxton]

Do you work in Windchill when using Creo? If you are not in a linked Windchill session then the working directory location can be critical to organizing and efficiently working.

The working directory is where Creo will save files by default. If you organize your projects in a directory structure then where files get saved is important for both revision control, organization of your work, and potentially if your active models regenerate if they have external references.

If you have never changed your working directory it may be full of obsolete and unrelated Creo data that could cause revision control or regeneration issues in some circumstances.

[Gavin_Lewis]

No, we don't use Windchill. I save all my files in the appropriate location on our shared network drive. There isn't much in my working directory because I hardly ever save a file without selecting the folder where I want it to be saved. We're a small company and we don't have any formal type of revision control.

[StephenW]

I don't remember specifically because we use PDMLink but I think that when you do a save as or navigate to save in another folder, creo changes your working directory to that folder.  Next time you do a save in a specific folder, re-open the file menu and click working directory and see if it is in the folder you saved to.

[Gavin_Lewis]

I just tried this and the working directory does not appear to have changed.

[StephenW]

Seems as if you have been doing what you've been doing to for 2 years, you likely don't have a problem, especially if you work in a group setting with other users and need to access the lastest files as projects demand.

Any NEWLY created files will be in your working directory.

For me, we use PDMlink, so the working directory is only for the odd files that Creo creates along the way. I usually delete those occasionally.

Working directory could also be a place for one of the config.pro files and the other customization files, depending on your setup.

[Gavin_Lewis]

Got it. It doesn't seem to be causing any issues for the way we manage Creo files at this company.

[KenFarley]

I might have another reason to pay attention to the working directory, depending on your configuration. If you have your "start in" directory set to a random directory in your documents, and you've been using this setup for years, you likely have a rather large amount of disk space used by trail files. Given computers these days have very large hard drives, this probably isn't anything to worry about, unless you're equipped with a small solid state drive. I've got a specific directory specified for trail files and when I've forgotten about it for a few months it can get chunky, measurable in GBs.

[rreifsnyder]

The working directory can have a major influence on what files open when working on files in several folders. If a large design is split into separate folders then search paths are used to let Creo find the files it needs within an assembly. If for instance you had a copy of a file in your working directory it would open that prior to looking within the search paths so if you don't understand the priority of how Creo selects which versions of files to open when it could really foul you up. There are also config settings that can affect how things are saved back to where they came from. If you have been working this way for several years without trouble then I assume these are set correctly such as save_object_in_current and override_store_back but it should still be watched carefully.