PDM Vault View File

In the event that a user is not able to create a local vault view via the PDM administration tool or by using the View Setup application, we can create a local vault view using a vault view file. This file has to be applied by a Windows user account with permissions to write to the Windows Registry. Generally this would require a Windows administrator account, but permissions can vary. The vault view file is available for download in the .zip file below.


Editing the Vault File

The vault view file is, by default, named FileVault.cvs. You can rename the field if you choose, but we must leave the extension as a .cvs. The first thing we’re going to want to do is to open this file in Notepad or a similar text editor like Notepad ++. Once open, we need to modify specific areas of this file to match our vault credentials.

The highlighted portions of the .cvs file are what we need to modify. These are the definitions of the highlighted values and where we need to look for that information.

Location: This is where we specify the location for the local vault view to be created on the user’s computer.

[FileVault]: We want to replace the text here with your vault name, leaving the square brackets in place

VaultID: Here, we must input the vault ID specific for your vault. In order to find this ID we’re going to want to open the PDM Administration tool (on any PDM client) and log in as the PDM admin. Once logged in, we right click our vault and select properties. The properties window will contain the vault ID. Copy it into this text file without any brackets.

DBName/DBServer/ServerLoc:

These three pieces of information can be obtained from the registry of a PDM client with a working local vault view. We’re going to want to navigate to the registry keys at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SolidWorks\Applications\PDMWorksEnterprise\Databases\*your vault name* and copy the information from the registry pertaining to the values we need for our vault file.

Verifying the Vault File

Once this information is in our vault file, we can save the file and move on to applying the file to create a local vault view. Please note that when you save the file it may default to save as a text file. Please make sure the extension on the file is .cvs before attempting to create your local vault view. Below is an example of a completed vault view file that is ready to be opened with the Viewsetup.exe application.

Applying the Vault File

In order to utilize our vault view file to create our local vault view, we need to run the FileVault.cvs with the PDM View Setup application.
First, let’s right click our filevault.cvs file and select the open with option. If we don’t see the selection for SOLIDWORKS PDM File Vault View Setup listed under open with, we should select the option to ‘choose default application’. We’ll need to navigate to our viewsetup.exe application which is by default located in the directory C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS PDM\viewsetup.exe.
Once we select our filevault.cvs file to run with the viewsetup.exe application we should be shown a Finish window for the vault view creation process. Pressing the finish button should create the view at the location specified in the file.

If we do run into an error, consult the PDM Administration tool Log File on that particular computer to see if we’re given any details on the error.

If the issue cannot be resolved easily, please contact Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support at 1-877-266-4469  (US), 1-866-587-6803  (CAN), or support@hawkridgesys.com.