Discussion on "Data Migration/Extraction from Autodesk Vault"

Andrew B · 2022-03-29T06:01:09.324Z

Introduction As part of my company's migration from Autodesk Vault as an Engineering management system, I was in charge of developing a method for extracting all of the files and metadata to be prepared for importation into the new system. Our reas...

Hello Andrew, Could you please help me with the following question?

Fileassciation table has links between files and when I open some physical files randomly most of them are in sync( meaning both fileassociation table and physical file have same links). But I noticed few file assembly files have child objects but these were not present in fileassociation table. What could be the reason for it or where can I find all the links correctly? Also I tried to read Bomblob field of fileiteration table but I couldn't see anything related to child ids

Hi Danny, are you trying to determine the BOM using the fileassociation table?

See my above answer to Joshi about fetching the BOM data from the FileIteration table in the BOMBlob field. Processing the XML data from that was the only reliable way I found to get the data matching up against what Inventor showed (You'll likely need to look at the XRefId for the child record)

This is an example of the Components section of the XML from an assembly:

This translates to: -BOM item #2 (CompId) -ChildID (FileIteration.FileIterationId from DB) of 868932

Hello Andrew, thanks for the article, very useful. My company is currently migrating Autodesk Vault data and files into Windchill and we faced an important issue: When you try to open an imported assembly that:

Contains renamed item in Vault before import (part/sub-assy)
The imported (main) assembly has not been updated in Vault before import (checked out/in).

Inventor searches for the original name part/assy, not the renamed one, so you have to browse for the file manually, also if the structure in Windchill is correct and the correct file is in the workspace. When you do the same using Autodesk Vault the assembly is updated automatically. I don't know if I made that clear, but have you ever faced an issue like this?

Thanks

Hi there, we had cases where a component of an assembly wasn't available in the new Windchill location but not for any renamed ones showing an issue that I'm aware of. We had to ensure that the search paths in the Inventor project were set to the Windchill Commonspace/Project folder so that it would line up

This is for cases where the raw ipt file names were still kept the same, I think you would have to open the assembly in Inventor and correct the missing items one by one as the CAD BOM is stored inside of the IAM file

Hi Andrew, Great article, really helped me to get started with inventor database. I recommend this article to my colleagues as well. I have few queries on this. Could you please me with these:

1) Could you please help me with where family table data is stored in inventor database.?

2) I see the count from filemaster table from the report you shared is 93,378. But in the end you have mentioned you have migrated 50,000 objects. So are the remaining is Non cad data or am I missing anything?

3) I really didn't understand the use of recursive CTE used on folder table, since vaultpath has already the folder structure for us. Could you please help me to understand why is this required?

Hi there, here are my answers to the questions:

1) Unfortunately our team didn't make use of family tables, so I'm unsure where it might be stored. One method I've used for something similar is to dump the entire DB to an SQL file and do a text search for a sample value that you're expecting and try to find which table/column it's located in

2) We filtered down the file counts to only include ipt, dwg and iam as we had as those were the only file types that were needed to migrate. There was a lot of other miscellaneous files (png, log, pdf) that weren't needed

3) The main use of the CTE was for us to determine the depth of the folders (which was needed by the destination system team and also aided in sorting) by counting the parent/child links. It could be done by counting the "/" character in the query but having the CTE didn't make a major performance difference: -6 seconds to execute with the CTE -3 seconds to execute without

Fantastic article. Very useful to understand Inventor db.

Hello Andrew, A very useful article. I have a query for you. What all tables are used to store Bill Of Material in Inventor Vault? I am looking for BOM details like child item id, quantity, find number etc. Could you please help?

Hi there, I found that the BOM data is stored in the FileIteration table in the BOMBlob field. It's encoded as XML so you'll need a way to expand and link that data.

This is an example of the Components section of the XML from an assembly:

This translates to: -BOM item #2 (CompId) -ChildID (FileIteration.FileIterationId from DB) of 868932

Thanks a lot Andrew B. This helps. I will give it a try now.

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Data Migration/Extraction from Autodesk Vault

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