Windchill Deleted Object History

[TomU]

Does anyone know if Windchill keeps track of objects that are deleted? Maybe in some audit table? I need to find out who deleted a particular object (and when).

The object no longer exists (all versions). I was able to find an unreferenced copy in the file vault.

Thanks!

Tom U.

[sdrzewiczewski]

You need to turn the Delete event on for Auditing, which it is not by default.

Here is a Support article on how to configure it.

[TomU]

Excellent! Do you know if this will significantly bloat the database? Are these audit entries occasionally pruned?

Thanks!

[cc-2]

From my own experience, it is best when users can't delete. If a document (wtpart, cad, of wtdocument etc..) is no longer required there should be a life cycle state such as Cancelled or Obsolete (we actually have both. Obsolote if the object has already been released, and Cancelled if it has never been released).

In the rare event a user did create an object by mistake then s/he must contact the administrator.

Also sometimes as you know it is impossible to delete due to dependencies with other objects. It should actually be the case more often than not if PDMLink is used to manage the relationship between all those documents. (as reference, in a structure etc...).

I know that it does not solve your problem as the object has been deleted but maybe it is a good time to review authorisation.

ciao

[ddemay]

Absent that auditing enabled...Apache Web server logs and looking at backup
of database or current database doing a negation query to match part object
identifer in apache logs against those still remaining in database. Lot
more work, but not impossible.
On Apr 10, 2015 10:37 AM, "Drzewiczewski, Steve" <->
wrote:

> You need to turn the Delete event on for Auditing, which it is not by
> default.
>
>
>
> Here is a Support article on how to configure it.
>

[TomU]

I agree. Our users are not allowed to delete. The only ones allowed are myself and one other system admin. I’m fairly certain neither of us deleted this object which is why I’m so confused. We hardly ever delete anything, especially after release. I just was hoping to prove that Windchill didn’t do this on its own…

[sdrzewiczewski]

That’s exactly why we enabled the Delete event, prior to our upgrade. We’ve had cases in the past were people blamed Windchill for deleting objects, we can now show them who actually deleted it.

One downside to this is because the object now no longer exists in Windchill you have to search on Delete events and a time frame, the object cannot be searched on, so then you need to pull the data into excel and search through that. It’s not user friendly, but it’s better.

As for database bloat it’s not too bad, it will be a lot of delete transactions for publishing and other things like that. I believe the Audit table can be purged or pruned, but we have not done that yet.

[TomU]

Just in case someone else tries to follow this tech support article, it's currently wrong. The path to this file changed in 10.2. The correct path is <windchill>\conf\auditing\configAudit.xml.

Tom U.

[cc-2]

Hi

this reminds me of a situation a couple of years ago. We got an engineering team who contacted my tech support team to say they could not find a drawing they created. We thought the drawing may have moved to somewhere they do not have access. So we search with all our super power, We could not find at all this drawing according to the number they gave us. We checked the number has not changed (we had to do some number cleansing at some point). No this number was not one of those. We could not find nor the drawing, nor the models (it was a small assembly).

Where was the damn thing. As they thought we could not believe us that they gave us the correct references, we received a pdf which was a scan of the drawing (which was already given to production but there was a problem so they needed to make a change and quickly) So of course, we got all the engineering team complaining about Windchill etc....

Once we had the scan of the drawing, we noticed that the drawing state was DEVELOPMENT and it had been done by a user who was no longer in our company.....

You can guess what had actually happen.

The user never checked in his work. He printed out the drawing to give to however who was happy to work with an uncontrolled copy and as the user had left the company for months his accounts and workspaces got deleted.

We already had at that time a procedure that if a user leaves it was the responsability of the line manager to ensure all work was checked in. Well this was not done, and my team assumed it was done.

So here is an example where people think got deleted. in a way they have been deleted because they never got checked in in the first place.!!!

When I say that data management is a skill !!!!!

Well that engineering team learnt it the hard way !!! the bad thing in that story is that it was so urgent that they decided to use autocad 2D to produce a drawing for production. So I bet this has never been remodelled in Creo.....

Have a good weekend all

[Vinay_S]

Late Reply to this post but I was just thinking admin can subscribe to the assembly and can get email updates if any modifications are done rite?