Inventor and Solidworks PDM

[Jonathan Leeper]

We have a new project with very large Inventor assemblies and approximately 300 drawings. Can SW PDM Standard recognize the relationships between Inventor parts, assemblies and drawings? Will the Inventor pack and go tool be the best way to get the files into PDM?
This is our first project using Inventor - any hints would be appreciated.

[jcapriotti]

While you can check-in any file, PDM Standard doesn't support other CAD tools and their integrations....you need PDM Pro.

[bnemec]

When we migrated SE data to PDM Pro pack and go was of no use because nearly all the files are reused in many other parent files. I could not find a way to get SE pack and go to use those files that already existed from other parents' pack and gos. So the files were copied into the vault and had to be checked in in a very careful order so that PDM could resolve the references. If a parent was checked in for the fist time before the referenced files were all checked in for the first then PDM just ignores those references. The problem was compounded by the SE files already having revisions so even though the revision of the SE file was mapped to the data card variable each file still needed to have SetRev done to set the rev counter for that file in the database.

In my experience, if you have more than ~1000 files to move you'll need to use PDM APIs to write a migration tool (stand alone application)

[Jonathan Leeper]

Thanks for the input @bnemec and @jcapriotti.

[David Matula]

When we migrated SE data to PDM Pro pack and go was of no use because nearly all the files are reused in many other parent files. I could not find a way to get SE pack and go to use those files that already existed from other parents' pack and gos. So the files were copied into the vault and had to be checked in in a very careful order so that PDM could resolve the references. If a parent was checked in for the fist time before the referenced files were all checked in for the first then PDM just ignores those references. The problem was compounded by the SE files already having revisions so even though the revision of the SE file was mapped to the data card variable each file still needed to have SetRev done to set the rev counter for that file in the database.

In my experience, if you have more than ~1000 files to move you'll need to use PDM APIs to write a migration tool (stand alone application)

That does not sound like any fun. I hope that I dont ever have to worry about doing that.