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We updated to Intralink 9.1 M040 from Intralink 3.4 in April. In general things have been going OK- the WAN performance is hugely better as we expected but users on the LAN are a bit annoyed with the number of menu click it takes to do simple tasks. I'm sure part of this is just a learning curve and attitudes will improve slowly but we've stumbled into a few major annoyances. One of these is the Where Used report which seems to be severely lacking in functionality compared with Intralink 3.4. It would behelpful if you could Add to workspace or do any other operation from it (like the BOM structure report), but our major concern is the inability to tell where a file is currently being used. An example:
PART1 is used in ASM 1 both are checked in at version 1.0
ASM1 is checked out and changed so it is no longer using PART1 and checked in at 1.1. A structure report on ASM1 1.1 does not show PART1.
If you chose PART1 and do a where used report, ASM1 shows up as version 1.0. There doesn't seem to be anyway to not show this dependency or to flag it as a not-latest dependency.
When an engineer replaces a part here, he wants to replace it everywhere it is currently being used so he does a Where Used report. Now he needs to go to the details of each object that shows up on the Where used report and see if it's the latest in the database. With one Where Used dependency this is annoying. With 50 Where Used dependencies, this is a several hour task.
Has anyone else run into this and figured out a way to flag which items are latest? The PTC techsupportcustomization team didn't think there was a supported way to customize this but maybe there's something unsupported?
Abby Dawkins
MCAD Support
KLA-Tencor Corp
(408)875-5892
The table "where used" on a CAD document is a JCA table, unfortunately it is not configured with custom views that might of helped you, but the good thing about these tables is that it is possible to modify/add them relatively easily. So for example adding the "add to workspace" button could be just a question of updating the actions XML with the action and testing (in JCA tables/trees we developed, which displayed CAD Document, adding that button just worked).
I should be possible to update the ootb table with a new column to do what you want, so at least the engineers could sort on it.
Otherwise, it is only a few days work to add an extended where used table to include information that you need and therefore not touch ootb behaviour.
Probably what I am suggesting here comes under the "unsupported" type of customisation
BTW I looked at PDMLink whichI am guessing is the same
Abby,
Have you had any luck creating a Where Used report that only shows Parents if they are the "Latest" version of that object?
We need this also!
Steve
Trane