Here’s another overflow blog post from my Autodesk University Class: PL1700 – A Cracking Story: Specialist Marine Interiors Experience with Autodesk® Vault Professional and Autodesk® PLM 360

After quite a lot of frustration and swearing at Vault while testing multiple scenarios, I recommend sticking with the auto generated Item numbers and removing any equivalence mapping to the Item number property from file part numbers. If you want the Part number to appear as a property within the Item then just map ‘Part Number’ to a new property called ‘Item Part Number’.

There are a few reasons why I take this approach:

  • Item numbers are quite simply a unique identifier. The info you really want to know about is the meta data or files associated with it
  • Item Numbers are non associative, even if the number is mapped from a file property. So if you change the filename & part number there is no mechanism to update the Item Number

Mapping the Part Number property to another Item Property maintains that associativity, but you do have to manually update the Item for it to happen.

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