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SK_116161321-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 6, 2025
Question

Renames causing data storage issues

  • February 6, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 920 views

For many years, uses have been using rename to "save-as" parts in Creo managed by Windchill with no regard to the parts being used in other assemblies and released data. Windchill fortunately manages this and fixes the pointer when the assembly is opened.

 

We are trying to archive our data and get out of Windchill to use Creo native. These renames are causing HUGE issues because the exported assembly from our Vault calls for the old name but we are exporting the renamed part and it doesn't know where to point. For 1 to 1 instances, we are able to manually fix the list, but when renames have happened multiple times or when the old name is reused again later the data is too jumbled for logic.

 

Has anyone delt with this or have any advice? Is this something re-vaulting can help with? Our company has not done that at any frequency over many years.

3 replies

T
23-Emerald IV
TomU23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
February 6, 2025

You **CANNOT** just grab data from the vault and expect it to be correct.  Windchill manages all kinds of things at the database level (parameter values, file names, etc.) that are not reflected in the physical files in the vault.  The only correct way to pull CAD data out of Windchill is through the workgroup manager - the workspace in the embedded browser inside Creo.

    avillanueva
    23-Emerald I
    avillanueva23-Emerald I
    23-Emerald I
    February 7, 2025

    I was going to echo what @TomU stated. Think about what Windchill does during a rename. Its quick and records the rename event in the database. What it does not do is go to the Creo files in the vault, open and update references. This ONLY occurs when files are brought out to a workspace inside of Creo application. This means that if I just download a file that had its reference renamed, and I do this multiple times, its gets corrected each time. Same is true if I have something open in session and a rename occurs on the Windchill side, I get altered and it fixes is real time. 

    In your case, the only supported way to get the CAD data out is to bring it out via a workspace and export from the workspace. What kind of volumes are we talking about? Workspaces can handle thousands of objects so it might take a few passes but you get get it all. 

      S
      SK_116161321-VisitorAuthor
      1-Visitor
      February 7, 2025

      Thanks for the reply @avillanueva. Definitely aware of all the file handling Windchill accomplishes on the back end. Unfortunately our latest released and in work data is around 1 million files... so our scale has definitely made this harder.

      D
      18-Opal
      d_graham18-Opal
      18-Opal
      February 7, 2025

      @TomU is correct. You have to somehow run the cad data through WGM.

       

      I've worked with a few companies recently that were moving away from Windchill and wanted to get all their CAD Data out of Windchill. These companies had hundreds of GB of data even if we were getting only the latest rev.iteration of each CAD object.

       

      I wrote a utility that took advantage of Packages to get the data out of Windchill.

      Here's how we did it.

       

      Neither had a CAD worker setup, which is mandatory as the CAD worker will process the cad files thru the Work Group Manager when the Package is zip.

      So, we setup CAD workers and I wrote a utility that automatically to do the export.

      Wrote and ran an SQL query to get the total file size we planned to export.

      Made sure the server had plenty space for these files.

       

      I created only one Package manually.  This package will be reused over and over again by a loop in the utility.

      The utility does the following:

      1. Unlocks the Package, if it is locked.
      2. Added CAD objects to the Package.
      3. Created a delivery.
      4. Zipped the delivery.
      5. Find the Zip file in the Windchill file vault.
      6. Download the Zip file to another Windows folder.
      7. Delete the delivery.
      8. Loop back to step 1 until all data is extracted.

      Once we had all the zip files downloaded, we ran another utility to extract the cad data from the zip file.

       

      The company wanted the Windows folder structure where the cad data was to be stored to match the Windchill folder structure, So, we automatically took care of that too.

       

      If you more info or help reach out to me, but rest assured this is quite doable.

       

      David

      windchill.developer@yahoo.com 

       

        S
        SK_116161321-VisitorAuthor
        1-Visitor
        February 7, 2025

        This is very interesting @d_graham. Any approximation for how long that would take for around 1 million files? How big can each package be and does it gather related files? We used SQL to get our list and then just run a batch code on the server and that takes about 24 hrs... but now we are dealing with the rename issues.

        P
        PG_98789043-Newcomer
        3-Newcomer
        February 7, 2025

         

        David Graham worked with me on a project very similar to this just 2 months ago. we had about 260k files, and 1600 job folders. and it took about 5-6 days overall. i ran into issues with queries not allowing multiple cadworkers at the same time, as well as search queries would get filed up and the tool would stop running and i would have to restart it. there were ways around it but i just buckled down and watched it over the course of a week instead of wasting time trying to make it more efficient. 

        so a couple of questions:

        do you guys have a cadworker or packages setup?

        what version of whindchill are you on?

        have you tried using the export tool and if so do you have the same result?

        have you tried loading the problem jobs in a workspace, and does the problem still follow if you do?

        his custom made script was able to run all the folders files through a cadworker and export them as a package (which essentially functions the same as putting a job through a workspace)

        David Graham gave us a very fair quote and worked tirelessly to solve the issue with me, so if you are looking for outside assistance for a reasonable price i might suggest you go that route. 

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