Does Windchill allow users to tag their non-CAD documents they upload with metadata?

[Mitul1203]

Wondering if Windchill allows users to tag their non-CAD files (i.e. Word, PDF, Excel, PPT, etc.) when they upload files with metadata (i.e. test report, test plan, user needs, name of product, a review this may be applicable for, or any pertinent info that user deems necessary).  We are using WC 11, but will be migrating to 12 soon.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[icelynnin]

Presumably you are talking about people adding non-CAD files as attachments on objects?

You might be better off getting users to upload these files as WTDocuments, and defining a selection of WTDocument subtypes with the appropriate attributes to match your required metadata.
You can then use associations such as Described by, Referenced By (and Configurable Links in WC12) to relate these documents to CAD files, products etc. 

It does require you to define up front a number of categories/subtypes that you identify that your users need to create documents as.

For example, you could have a 'Test Report' document subtype, and have attributes such as Test Plan, Product name, and user requirements as attributes. 

If you also have e.g. Test Plan, Product name etc. as objects in the system then you then set up links between these objects to represent these references, instead of just having entered text. Configurable Links can be leveraged for these freeform N-to-N links as far as I understand, and also control the required types for these links. (e.g. set up a TestReportPlanLink which can only link a test report to a single test plan, but allows a test plan to be referenced by many test reports)

Just be wary of configuration vs customisation, configurable links comes very close to the latter, and could be unsupported by PTC support.

[Mitul1203]

No I am not talking about files as attachments on objects.

From the solution you mentioned.  Can you search on Attributes?

To add to the problem, we are currently not using WTParts properly.  Just scratching the surface of how we can use it on projects.

IF all documements are linked to the CAD either by Referenced by or Described by, does that make it easier to find artifacts.  If metadata tagging is not possible, then we would have to rely on users looking up the part they are interested in, get to the WTPart and find all associated data.  In a sense this data organization is more product focused than what we currently do, which is organize data via folders and those folders are competency focused (i.e. Quality, Sys Engr, etc.)

[icelynnin · Accepted solution]

So presumably you are currently uploading non-CAD files into new WTDocument objects.

Yes, you can search on attributes- this is one of the reasons for them existing. In Advanced Search, you can specify for an attribute with a certain values in various ways, or just if you search globally, it will also return results back with the search term in the attributes. You should also be able to turn on in-document search, I believe if you have an index engine (i.e. SOLR Indexer) installed. This means searching global search will also bring back results for hits from inside of uploaded text and office files.

You can also search for specific types, so you could end up searching e.g. for:

Quality Test Reports, with attribute Product Name="Galaxy S21", and it would return you all Quality Test Reports with the product name field populated with that value.
In my opinion, some fields like that are dangerous as they rely on users manually filling those fields in correctly. This can be avoided by giving the attribute rules that force it to be one of a set of values,  i.e. an enum.

Alternatively, if you are already sorting content into Product containers, you can search just inside of specific product or library containers!

[Mitul1203]

I'm pretty sure in document search is active.  I am not an admin, but I can ask our admins. Thanks for all your help!