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 Inventor plus metadata or descriptive characteristics. You must save the designs often to keep the collaborative group informed of any changes. When saving Inventor objects to ENOVIA, ENOVIA Collaborative Design for Inventor 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 About Saving in ENOVIA for information of the settings that the users may modify while saving designs to ENOVIA.

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.

Attibutes are synchronized automatically upon saving to ENOVIA.

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

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

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 Inventor provides a Retain Lock option while saving designs. By selecting the Retain Lock option during a save the lock is maintained by the user 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 Inventor you can create new revision stream while saving designs using right-click on selected designs in the ENOVIA Save dialog box. A new column, Target Revision is added in the ENOVIA Save dialog box. The target revision specified in the ENOVIA Save Options dialog box is set as the revision..

You can manually edit the values of the revision specified under the Target Revision column. See Revising Designs for more details.

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.

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.

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 Inventor Administrator's Guide.

Custom iPart Support

If you are saving an assembly which has one or more participating custom iParts, then for all participating custom iParts , the file names that are provided at the time of file generation and the current locations are used.

For iParts that are not placed in any assembly which is being saved, the default file names as provided by Inventor is used. The iPartFactory files also use these default filenames and the root folder is sent as the location.

If another user tries to use this iPartFactory in any other assembly and provides another file name, then a warning message that the file already exists is displayed.

Each time the user ignores the warning to choose the existing filename and chooses a file name other than already existing one, then the file is considered as a new iPart created in the parent iPartFactory.

The Save behaviour for custom iParts is undefined if the iPartFactory attribute ["CustomiPartFileNames"] to track filenames is modified by the user.

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.

Warning: When read only behavior is enabled, the display of iAssemblies and iParts in the Save dialog box during subsequent Save operations (not NEW) depends on whether these iAssemblies / iParts participate in another structure.
  • iAssemblies and iParts, which are associated with modified factories and which participate in another structure are displayed in the Save dialog box as Modified. Their associated factories are also displayed in the Save dialog box.
  • iAssemblies and iParts which are associated with modified factories but are not participating in any structure are not displayed in the Save dialog box.