Enforce Drawing is Updated Check to avoid production errors

If the designer/engineer exports an older version of the model data to a PDF or DWG file, it would obviously result in wrong version being produced which ultimately costs a lot time and money for the company.

When a PDF or any other neutral format of an Inventor drawing is created by a Job Processor there is the chance that an outdated Inventor drawing is used to publish the PDF. This can happen if a change is performed to a part or an assembly that is used in the drawing and the drawing is not opened and updated after the model was changed.

The outcome of exporting a wrong version of a drawing can be devastating, let alone be frustrating. But not to worry, we have a brilliant solution for this expensive problem in the form of a workflow that uses coolOrange powerJobs Client to restrict the release of a drawing file. With that the generation of the neutral format, when the drawing is older than any of the parts or assemblies that are used in the drawing's structure, will be restricted. For performance reasons, the workflow does not open the drawing file but analyses the references stored in the Vault database to find all files that are involved in the structure of the drawings that are about to be released.

This workflow can be installed via our coolOrange workflow installer in less than 30 seconds. Once you install the workflow, it gets automatically integrated into powerJobs.

This workflow improves the reliability of your publishing process by ensuring the drawing is up to date before it can be released and that published artifacts, like PDFs, are always done with valid drawings. It also means that the publishing step, when done on the Job Processor, need not Get and download all the referenced model files to make a valid drawing. Instead, the "fastopen" option can be used to create the PDF using only the (usually much smaller) IDW or DWG file as its sole input. For drawings of large complex models this can be a significant time savings.

Check out our other sample-workflows at coolOrange Labs GitHub site.