When working with SOLIDWORKS files outside of any PDM system, it is very common to want to manage the revisions of your files by manually setting the custom property values. However, when importing SOLIDWORKS files into EPDM, the database needs to be taken into consideration as EPDM does not automatically sync the custom property values to the database unless you build in the logic to do so. For instance, if you just added legacy files with existing revisions to your normal production workflow, EPDM would treat them as any new file, ignore any manually set revision, and then when it came time to stamp the revision, it would simply start at the beginning.
Dispatch is a very powerful EPDM tool which can be used for a variety of file specific operations. A very common need for the Vault would be an easy way to rename large amounts of SOLIDWORKS files based on certain data card values, and/or user inputs. This can be very easily accomplished with the use of a dispatch script. In the following example, I will explain the logic behind creating a working script to rename SOLIDWORKS files based off of a data card value.
