Single-Level View Version Conversion Deprecation and warning
Blast from the past has kicked me in the "ast".
Glad I am reading 12.1.2 What's new. So, I've had my system running since Windchill 7. At that time view versions used a multi-level version schema (A.A, A.B, etc). While I've known about the new default for single level and this utility for sometime, it was never on my near term to-do list to convert. I am now jumping to version 13.0.2 so am I hosed? I know deprecated does not mean gone but if I have to do this before I upgrade, I need to get it done now.
https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS414044?source=search
Just search and found this. Ok, not hosed but let's run a test on my test server. The process was very straight forward, documented here: Running the SingleLevelViewVersionConversionUtility Command Line Utility It generates scripts by context (Project, Product, Library and Org) where you can convert all parts versions with multi-level view versions to single-level. What was B.- should become B. Process took about 45 mins to run all areas and convert 33K versions, zero errors but I recommend running the WinDU scripts InvalidSeriesValues, RevisionLabelCleanserDT, SeriesSortDiagnosticTask and RevisionSequenceCleanserDT just to make sure you are error free first.
Here is the real kick in the teeth. We have a number of Part versions that were loaded in via imports that did not start with our first version letter of - (Dash). Say I started life at version E and created a new view version off that which became E.-. Same would follow when I revised to F, becoming F.- for the Manufacturing view. Here is an example of what I expected and what happened:
| Number | versionInfo.identifier.versionId | Expected New Version | Resulting Version |
| PartXYZ | E.- | E | - |
| PartXYZ | F.- | F | A |
| PartXYZ | G.- | G | B |
| PartXYZ | H.- | H | C |
I understand why it did what it did and some of the complexities that had to be handled (What if I had E.A and E.B existing?) but boy did this create a mess. Glad it was on Test server and not production. Still, 26% of the revisions are not what I would consider correct (where version of Manufacturing view matches version of Design view it was derived from). I am not expecting that someone has a ready made solution for this legacy issue but if you do, please reply. I expect to be writing a large SQL query to clean this all up and be ready to do this for my production system when I convert it. Happy Thanksgiving all.

