Download multiple files

Mike,

You don’t say whether you need to do this as a one off, or regularly.

If you have*.plt files available from the system then one option might be to download those. Which you could perhaps do using a custom utility, or maybe by putting everything in one context/folder and using a package, or the standard “export/import” tools to get them out to the operating system. Once the PLT files are downloaded and available in a directory somewhere there are a few command line utilities you could use to convert (print) those to PDF using a script or bat file. Earlier versions of Product View support command line printing.

If this is something you need to do routinely, then I would recommend that you configure your workers to produce PDF files as the representation for documents and EPMDocuments for drawings. Unfortunately while this is entirely possible and allegedly supported, it is not documented at all, and getting it to work like you need is more a black art than a science. There are also some third parties that sell a bolt on toolset that do this, and I am sure they would offer support on it too. Even with PDF’s readily available from Windchill you will still need some kind of utility to do the download. Sadly I don’t know of any “nice” way to do that from the user interface, we use a load from file utility that takes object numbers as input. Though it would be great to have something that worked using the collector, so far our needs have been limited to system admins so what we have has worked.

Does anyone know if there are any user interface tools by third parties for downloading content from Windchill?

-----

Lewis

In Reply to Mike Lockwood:

This has been asked many times before but we don't recall the answer.

We need to download a large number (thousands) of files, both documents and Pro/E drawings. Both need to be either Word or PDF.

Suggestions?

note: For WTDocuments, we commonly create a temporary document structure, then select "Download all primary files" and this works very well. For CAD - we publish to PLT, not PDF and so do not have published PDF viewables currently available.

thanks in advance

We find PTC’s neglect in this area unacceptable. Windchill 10.0 solves this; however this was such an easy task in Intralink 3.4 which is missing in Windchill 9.1. It took 10 releases for PTC to come up with a solution, and they wonder why they have many customers still on Intralink 3.4?

-Dave Engel