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LawrenceS18-Opal
18-Opal
February 11, 2016
Question

Searching PDMLink / Windchill

  • February 11, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 7208 views

Any ideas on how to improve the breath of searching abilities in PDMLink?  Most particularly:

  1. At minimum, PDMLink should be able to search every area that a user can input information in PDMLink, but apparently it doesn't?!  For example, currently it doesn't search Change notice attachments, nor even the description that the user types in the PDMLink description field!  In addition, there are some areas of CAD objects that it has not searched but perhaps someone else can remember which ones.
  2. This may be a stretch, but is there an easy way to get PDMLink to index and search drawing content (that are not attributes...the text actually on the drawing)?

Thanks! Lawrence

2 replies

T
tstacy1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 11, 2016

Do you have Solr installed?  That is the indexing tool that will allow keyword search to search content.

BTW. What version of Windchill are you using?

L
LawrenceS18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
February 11, 2016

Yes, we use Solr, and it is setup to be used to index everything else in PDMLink, but not the stuff I described above.

Also, our drawings are published to HPGL because if we published them to pdf we had a few problems.

We are on WC 10.1

R
RandyJones20-Turquoise
20-Turquoise
February 11, 2016

Lawrence Scheeler wrote:

Any ideas on how to improve the breath of searching abilities in PDMLink?  Most particularly:

  1. At minimum, PDMLink should be able to search every area that a user can input information in PDMLink, but apparently it doesn't?!  For example, currently it doesn't search Change notice attachments, nor even the description that the user types in the PDMLink description field!  In addition, there are some areas of CAD objects that it has not searched but perhaps someone else can remember which ones.
  2. This may be a stretch, but is there an easy way to get PDMLink to index and search drawing content (that are not attributes...the text actually on the drawing)?

You can configure solr to index the text in (Creo Parametric) drawings by setting indexable to true for the DRW formatName.  See:

http://www.ptc.com/cs/help/windchill_hc/wc100_hc/index.jspx?id=WCCG_Serv_DataFormats_AddUpdateDataFormats&action=show

Basically you are going to use:

  • windchill wt.content.DataFormatUtil -list 
    • to list the current formatName's and their information
  • windchill wt.content.DataFormatUtil -update
    • to update the DRW formatName and set indexable=true

after this you will need to run the bulk indexer ( windchill wt.index.BulkIndexTool )  in order to get the drawings indexed - might take a while depending on how many you have

Trying this on a test server is always good...

    L
    LawrenceS18-OpalAuthor
    18-Opal
    February 11, 2016

    , Thanks for posting this method/suggestion, I will look into this and post back...

    C
    CaitlinWheeless1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 12, 2016

    Another description of how to do this is available here "Add CAD Data to Windchill Index Search": http://support.ptc.com/cs/help/windchill_hc/wc110_hc/WCSysAdminIndexSearch_SetUpWCIndexSearchIndexCADPart.html

    Also "Specify MIME Types for Content Indexing":

    http://support.ptc.com/cs/help/windchill_hc/wc110_hc/WCSysAdminIndexSearchFileContentIndexing.html

    See the sections:

    • "Add a MIME Type"
    • "Verify that a MIME Type is Indexable"

    Regarding Change Notice attachments -

    Yes, it appears that the attachment description field is not indexed OOTB. However, the attachment content and file names should be indexed, and keyword-searchable. The caveat is that the Change Notice is listed in the search results -- not the attachment.

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