List of Preference settings?

[davehaigh]

PTC is telling me there's no way to export the preference setting on a system.

Is there a way to print them out? Or does someone have a better solution.

I'm trying to compare settings on two different systems.

David Haigh
Phone: 925-424-3931
Fax: 925-423-7496
Lawrence Livermore National Lab
7000 East Ave, L-362
Livermore, CA 94550

[MikeLockwood]

This is a fundamental part of administration, for Preferences and many other similar things in Windchill (like Profiles, States, Roles, etc) - you need to be able to:

- Know what they are

- Know what the defaults are (which occasionally change for different releases but are undocumented)

- Have a place to record what your settings are, and why (some have hours of research and testing behind them)

- Where recorded, be able to show what differs by context where applicable (e.g. different value in a specific Library vs. at Site or Org)

The obvious thing to do is:

- Download a list of all as supplied, including all defaults

- Put into a spreadsheet (not the best because of the hierarchical nature of preferences, but not too bad)

- Add columns for above info

- Maintain this over time

So, you of course:

a) In the UI, look for a download or export button (none found)

b) Try to find in some admin guide how download or export (none found)

c) Put in a tech support call for how to download or export (PTC says "why would anyone ever want to do that?")

We have laboriously created such spreadsheets for every area over time, and try to keep them up to date (lots of work). Looking forward to when there are system tools in Windchill to do this.

For the immediate question, please see attached - hopefully will be helpful. Please supply back any improvements that you make on this.

[MikeLockwood]

One more option (I forgot about this) - see attached query builder report. Simply import, then run, TSV. It returns all in a reasonable output that can be opened in Excel, then manipulated.


From: Lockwood,Mike,IRVINE,R&D

[JohnRozanc]

If attempting to bulk load preferences here are the locations of the files that contain the internal names for the string values. All of them are located from the Windchill/SRC folder.

[pwilliams-3]

In Windchill 10.0 there is a utility called wt.preference.ExportPreferences that is detailed on page 52 of the Windchill Specialized Administration Guide. I don't think this utility is available for 9.X.

Patrick Williams | Engineering Systems | o: 616.698.3766 | c: 616.947.2110
[cid:image001.jpg@01CCD767.26E3AC00]

[AL_ANDERSON]

We made a custom jsp in Windchill 10 to print all the preferences in a
readable format, and color code anything that is different than the system
default.

Looks like this.




It is easy to copy/paste into excel.

Al Anderson

[SimonLucas]

Hi,

We have been working on a similar issue as we are building a second servr to use with secure projects and wanted to transfer preference settings from our production server.

Currentlly we are using a combination of a report which extracts all preference instance settings for site and org level (ie any preferences changed from default) which we output as a TSV file. We then feed this into a vb app we have written which separates them into site level and org level load xml files. We can then read these directly into the new system via wt.load.loadFromFile.

The only issue we have at the moment is promotion preferences. These export from the production system OK, but when we import them to the new server they do not show up in the UI while all other new instances do, so we have to remove these before importing (or create the preferences first through the GUI.

All other prefernce instances transfer fine though.

Nice to see they have thought about this a bit more with WC10.

Simon Lucas