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Windchill subscriptions

MikeLockwood
22-Sapphire I

Windchill subscriptions

We're about to implement reverse proxy and open up our Windchill system to about 500 vendors, each with access to just one Project.

Current intensely studying / experimenting with both subscriptions and notification policies - attempting to set up such that Project templates will be helpful on this also.  Finding many very large gaps and issues / limitations. These relate to, among others:

- cannot set up a subscription to a Role in the Project Team; only option is individual users or an Org-level Group

- cannot (so far) find a way to trigger policy notification when a CAD Doc or Doc is shared to a project, or updated in the project (works for subscription)

- cannot (so far) find a way to set up subscription for all folders in the project (works for any one folder)

- have been customizing the emails; after two workshops with SME's, all said to eliminate most items, leaving only a message and a hyperlink - they now would like to add a few

Most powerful and robust for notification is to set up:

- in this / these locations (e.g. a folder and subfolders)

- for these events (e.g. new CAD Doc shared to project)

- send to these people (e.g. whoever is currently mapped to the "Vendor" Role in the project team)

Really great stuff to be working on and I'm learning a lot.  If anyone has gone down this path and would like to discuss, would love to hear from you.

thanks in advance

10 REPLIES 10

Mike, have you tried creating the subscription from the Project > View All list to cover all folders?

I think I did this correctly but may have missed something - will look at again closely.  Any more detail on where / how to do this?  screenshot?

thanks

We are on a similar path and ended up designing  a workflow to share files from product to project. So when the product team needs to share files, they create a soft type of problem report which we named as "Share Request". Share request workflow shares the files collected to respective project based on the attribute selection in create wizard.The requests are created in product space and resolves roles from product context team. Since we leverage a workflow, we are able to use a custom workflow notifications to notify the respective suppliers and other stake holders when files are shared. The workflow also captures our interactions with the suppliers. More than anything it gives us the ability to track/audit all the shares and notify respective owner if the files are shared for longer duration than what is mandated by the security team. With whole a lot of suppliers, you will end up with a pretty large amount of shared files and often it is a pain from a administrative front.

Thanks for the info - we may do the same.  Got ambitious and thought that we might be able to execute both the share to project and starting workflow with one action.  Tech support case just now - no API for Share to Project.

So, looks like we'll have to have users initiate the workflow as you've stated.  Likely will use a sub type of change request instead of problem report - and add an Action such that one does not have to select Change Request, then a sub type of it but can select directly.

We're going to pilot this cautiously and try to work out the configurations and process carefully before extending to a lot of users.

Mike Lockwood wrote:

Thanks for the info - we may do the same.  Got ambitious and thought that we might be able to execute both the share to project and starting workflow with one action.  Tech support case just now - no API for Share to Project.

Windchill has supported api's for sharing to project:

  • DataSharingHelper.service.shareVersion(Persistable object, WTContainerRef to_container_ref, Folder to_folder) Shares an object given the target container and the target folder.
  • DataSharingHelper.service.shareVersions(WTCollection objects, WTContainerRef to_container_ref, Folder to_folder) Shares a WTCollection given the target container and the target folder.

while(prjQresult.hasMoreElements()) {

  proj = (Project2) prjQresult.nextElement();

  Object localObject = WTContainerRef.newWTContainerRef(proj);

  String new_folder_path = "//Default//"+programSelected;

  Folder folderForSharingData = getFolder(new_folder_path,(WTContainerRef) localObject);

   for(WTObject affItem:affectedItemsList){

  DataSharingHelper.service.shareObject(affItem,(WTContainerRef)localObject,folderForSharingData);

  }

You can use data sharing helper to share objects, it works great even though it is not supported. I am surprised to see DataSharingService

is marked as supported even though PTC says there are no supported APIs to share to project.

You can create a custom action to create the subtype of the change object, copy over the out of the box JSPs and modify the create.Bean command to directly call the subtype. In this way, the custom action directly opens the wizard with the subtype selected, they don't have to even select the soft type.

<jca:initializeItem operation="${createBean.create}" baseTypeName="wt.change2.WTChangeIssue|com.xxxx.ShareRequest"/>

Wow - both of these work nicely.  But explicitly not supported (in 10.2 and 11.0), so very hesitant to use.

Hi Binesh Kumar‌, Randy Jones‌,

I worked with Mike Lockwood‌ and also check internally and it has been confirmed as the above mentioned API is not supported customization.

Regards,

Shirish

Hi Shirishkumar Morkhade,

Thanks for confirming that. The documentation on java doc says DataSharingService  is supported


Was that a typo in the documentation? I am curious whether PTC marked this API as not supported because of some reported issues.


Regards

Binesh

We are planning to use ProjectLink to distribute documents to vendors as well. Still there is no way to create a subscription for them when a new object is shared to a Project Container.

 

I found an article CS148719 describing the same issue and this was the result:

"The ability to create a notification that is configured on a project such that the notification is issued whenever the project is the target of some share is not available out of the box."

"Reported to R&D as SPR 2200364"

The SPR 2200364 has been closed by PTC with the status: "No Plans to Fix".

 

I have created an idea for this new feature. Please feel free to vote it up.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill-Ideas/Subscription-for-all-objects-shared-to-a-ProjectLink-Project/idi-p/632152

 

In the mean time we will try to get by with folder subscriptions as recommended by @MikeLockwood

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