Custom Attachment Service

Kinetic ERP
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Does anyone know if it is possible to create a custom attachment service? By that I mean, something other than the following options:

  • Link
  • Server Storage
  • Sharepoint
  • ECM (DocStar)

For example, we use SolidWorks PDM for our engineering document storage. I would love to link PDM documents to Epicor via attachments. PDM has an API, so it could be possible to create a service/adapter to communicate between the two systems.

I don’t know if that’s possible, and if it is, maybe it would require the SDK? Just curious if anyone has ever thought about this or pursued it in any way.

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I have been thinking about this. I’d love to be able to link the Solidworks file and then pull dimensions/bubble info into Enhanced Quality. If it is indeed an API, an https request would work so a Link attachment type would be perfect.

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In theory, could you not select one attachment method you are not using (let’s say SharePoint for example) then, set up a base bpm [vs. pre or post] hijacking the various methods like “get list”, “download”, “upload”, etc.?

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We have some Solidworks PDM / Epicor integrations.

  1. When a new part rev is checked into the vault a powershell script runs that calls a function in Epicor that calls back to the vault to get the updated part data and updates the part data in Epicor.

  2. In Epicor Job entry screen (classic) we have some custom code that will reach out to the PDM vault and get the drawings for all the profile parts in the job and attach them to the job material.

notes:
The vault has a REST Api but it is not that good or well documented. I found that once you login with the REST Api to access the vault it consumes a licence and there is no (working) logout process that will release the licence. This meant all the licencese got used and we had angry engineers. You can access the database directly for reading data so we went down that path as a work around for the licence issue. the database schema is not straight forward…

The custom properties from Solidworks are stored in the vault Database so you can access those. I dont think you can access any other information in the Solidworks files unless you get a copy of the file and open with Solidworks or the SolidWorks Document Manager API

Happy to elaborate if people are interested.

Brett

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I was looking at these examples:

Particularly:

Dassault’s Official Documentation:

Separately, there are Solidworks viewers out there that run without a local installation, so it seems doable. :person_shrugging:

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We use SolidWorks. What I do is have a scheduled function that continuously monitors a part revision and will reach out to the vault if the PdmNumber UD field is filled out on the part and there is no drawing. The drawing will be automatically added within a short period of the part revision being added.

Before I got involved with Epicor, I wrote several large customizations of Solidworks and PDM for our engineering team. If you need help navigating the api, I can help as well.

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Thanks for the responses and offers to help. I’m pretty familiar with integrating SolidWorks with Epicor. It’s one of my favorite things to do. :smiley:

I think I will probably use a ‘Link’ type attachment and build some infrastructure with the APIs to connect the dots.

If I come up with anything cool, I’ll be sure to share.

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How is this project going? We are pushing PDM data to Epicor, but now want to view part drawing via a click. Any guidance would be appreciated. I know nothing about PDM right now, so you can talk to me like I am a three year old.

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We create link like the following. This tells the PDM application on the workstation to open the vault to a specific document in a folder (project). This is a single click from the browser if you can get it in this form.

conisio://yourvaultname/view?projectid=31427&documentid=447632&objecttype=1

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Ahh - What about folks that don’t have PDM installed?

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You would have to write an API that would return the file from PDM. Then call that API from a function.

We don’t have that problem because all of users have the PDM client installed with enough viewer licenses to handle all of them

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SolidWorks PDM has a web app that allows users to view files without the PDM software installed on their computer.

It has eDrawings embedded, so you can view models in 3D, measure, etc. Building the URL is pretty straighforward if you can get access to the document record in the PDM database.

image
image2015×1167 240 KB

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We should try this again. The early versions of the web app were not that great. Looks like it has come a long way

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Our CAD manager setup a workflow in PDM that copies the PDF drawing to a shared folder when the drawing is released. Epicor can then pull the drawing from the shared folder.

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