Hi Christian,

I'm glad you found a use for "Extended EDM files", a feature we added support for a long time ago but which very few customers are using. That's also why it is sadly not yet in place in Aurena. We simply have not had the time to add it there yet. And it's not good that we forgot to remove this feature from the documentation like we have done for other things we have not added back yet (full support for structure documents, for example, which is a little bit related, or can be used for similar things) or decided not to add back at all. That's how it is sometimes, things slip through the cracks...

Can you describe what you were planning to use this functionality for and possibly also what your company is working on, when you need this? Perhaps we can find some way around the current limitation.

Thanks!

/Mathias
 

Hi Mathias,

thanks for your response.

We basically have one main use for this functionality: To make different output formats of engineering drawings available to the company. E.g. we make a drawing in our CAD-System and the native CAD-Format drawing file is managed in the engineering PDM Application (not the IFS PDM module, 3rd party PDM-System). Once the drawing gets released in the external PDM application, different formats of the drawing are automatically created, e.g. PDF, DXF, DWG and via interface should be attachted to the corresponding document in IFS, so that downstream process contributors like purchasing and manufacturing have the necessary information in the format of their choice.

We have investigated work around solutions like multiple pages etc. and also had a lot of hope for the new “technical drawing” in IFS Cloud but it’s not really what we are looking for. Extended EDM really fits the gap.

Christian

Thanks for explaining!

We do have support for “XEDMs” little brother in Aurena, support for view copies (it requires the Aurena Agent to work, but most probably you want to use that anyway). That is basically what you want, but you want more than one view copy file per document (if I understand you correctly). We support any file as a view file, not only a PDF, if you set them up as being such.

Would it work with only one view copy per document?

Other ideas, although they require more manual work, would be to keep the view copies in another document revision, either as a sub document or as a separate sheet. Perhaps with the help of some custom events, things can be automated so that it all fits better together (sorry, I don’t have any concrete ideas as of now).

Good luck!

We are aware of the possibility of using any file format for the view file and have questioned if we can go down to only one view file, but we scrapped that idea as it does not fit our requirement and would cause a new problem during migration.

Another document revision would “disconnect” the clear 1:1 relationship beween the native CAD-Drawing number and its output documents and their number.

What is the roadmap for this functionality in IFS Cloud? What is the right path to adress this to R&D?

How about using multiple document sheets ? Then the document number stays the same. One or more secondary sheets could keep the view files.

Another option would be to zip multiple view files together and add the zip as the view file. It’s more work, of course, but perhaps both the zipping and unzipping/viewing can be automated using document macros or using some other clever solution?

I’ll try to get a comment here from my product manager about your backlog question, and on how to get requirements into R&D.

Hello Mathias,

sorry to bug you, but do you have any update on the roadmap or the requirement communication to R&D?

THX

Christian

Hi Christian,

I’m afraid I don’t have any update yet.

Did you give the other options I mentioned a thought?