About Saving in ENOVIA

The Save function lets you save the design information into the ENOVIA vault for sharing across the enterprise.

The design information consists of the physical files created in AutoCAD plus metadata or descriptive characteristics. You must save the designs often to keep the collaborative group informed of any changes. When saving AutoCAD objects to ENOVIA, ENOVIA Collaborative Design for AutoCAD provides several options that affect the behavior of the Save process. The default settings for these parameters are specified in the Global preferences which is set by your Integration Administrator. See Setting Preferences section of ENOVIA Designer Central Installation and Administrator's Guide for details on setting global preferences. See Saving Designs to ENOVIA for information of the settings that the users may modify while saving designs to ENOVIA.

The following topics are discussed:

Related Topics
Limitations in ENOVIA Save
Using Quick Save Active

Attribute Synchronize

Attribute synchronization ensures that the attributes in the design file on your computer match the attributes of the associated ENOVIA object.

During the design process, you can enter or change attributes or properties of the design. When you save the design, you want those attributes and properties to become part of the metadata for the ENOVIA object.

Your Integration Administrator specifies which attributes and properties can be synchronized.

Note: See ENOVIA Designer Central Installation and Administrator's Guide for details on attributes that are mapped, mapping attributes, and enforcing attribute synchronization.

Note: You can also synchronize attributes when you open a design from ENOVIA.

Note: Synchronization of Block Attribute(s) does not happen when AutoCAD drawings are saved in ENOVIA.

Lock Status While Saving Designs

Locking designs in ENOVIA ensures that no other user can modify the designs you are working on. Lock status of a design indicates whether the design that exists in ENOVIA is locked by you or any other user. The designs in ENOVIA Save dialog box can be selected for saving only if the designs are not locked by any other user or the design is locked by you.

Note: Lock status is valid only for designs that exist in ENOVIA vault. Lock status is not displayed when you save the designs the first time.

ENOVIA Collaboration for AutoCAD provides a Retain Lock option while saving designs. By selecting the Retain Lock option during a save, the lock is maintained so that subsequent edits and saves may be performed.

Applying a Lock indicates the intent to modify the design.

New Revision Stream

Revision is a controlled release of a design that replaces previous releases. Each release is usually identified by an associated letter code, termed the "revision level" or simply "revision". The purpose of revisioning is to maintain the history of a design in order to be able to return to a previous release at any point in time.

Using ENOVIA Collaborative Design for AutoCAD you can create new revision stream while saving designs using right-click on selected designs in the ENOVIA Save dialog box. The new revision stream that is created is next in sequence to the current stream.

Obsolete Designs

Any design is considered Obsolete if a newer design exists in the ENOVIA database.

Your design is considered obsolete because it is based on an earlier design than the latest design in ENOVIA. To resolve obsolete designs and continue working with the previous version, you can update your designs in your local workspace using Designer Central Client. See Working with ENOVIA Designer Central Client section of ENOVIA Designer Central User's Guide for details on updating designs from local workspace folders.

For example, a design has been stored with multiple versions: 1 & 2 in ENOVIA databse. User A opens version 1 wanting to ignore the modifications made in V2. When User A tries to save version 1, the design is displayed as obsolete in ENOVIA Save dialog box.

Part Association During Save

In an effort to expose the CAD designs to the engineering community as early as possible, ENOVIA Collaborative Design for AutoCAD provides an optional setting that will automatically create an ENOVIA Engineering Central part and associate it to the CAD model during a Save operation. The engineering part created will have the same name as the CAD model.

Note: To enable this, settings must be made in Global Preferences by the Integration Administrator. See ENOVIA Designer Central Installation and Administrator's Guide for details on these settings.

EBOM Synch on Saving

EBOM Synchronization feature provides a tool to automatically generate the EBOM structure to match the CAD model/assembly structure. During this process all mapped attributes are also transfered to the engineering parts. In addition the CAD models are directly associated to the engineering parts as CAD specifications allowing engineers direct access to the supporting CAD model data.

Note: This must be configured by the Integration Administrator. For more details on the required settings, see "Configuring the EBOM Configuration Object" section in ENOVIA Collaborative Design for AutoCAD Administrator's Guide.

Read Only Behavior

This section lists the behavior changes in the Save feature when MCADInteg-FileReadOnlyBehavior is set as TRUE in the global configuration object by your Administrator.

The behavior changes in Save feature depends on the selection of Retain lock on checkin option during save in the ENOVIA Save dialog box.

  • If Retain lock on checkin option is selected, then the file is writable after save is successful.
  • If Retain lock on checkin option is not selected, then the file remains read-only after save.