by Florentina Stirbu
Manually filling in revision information in a revision table can prove to be tedious, time consuming and error prone.
In a Vault environment, revision tables can be controlled by Vault and display drawing information that is in Vault. For AutoCAD based products that have the Vault integration (add-in) installed, revision tables can be configured by following the steps below. To configure this for Autodesk Inventor drawings, see this post.
1. Configure the Vault Revision Table – Revision table control must first be enabled in Vault. Administrators can turn this on by accessing Tools -> Administration -> Vault Settings -> Behaviours-> Revision table…
Establishing property mappings can be done on the Vault Client side, in the same section.
Alternatively, this can be configured in the AutoCAD based product (if logged in with an administrative account) by accessing the Vault Options -> Revision table integration settings (VLTOPTIONS command).
2. Edit the revision table template(s) to match the Vault definition – after choosing what properties will be displayed in the revision table, the templates must be edited to match. In the %APPDATA%\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx Vault Addin folder, there are two templates: dwg and vaac_RevBlockMetric.dwg
Either customise the relevant DWG or save a copy as a company template. As an example, I have saved a copy of the metric version as “Cadline_RevBlockMetric” and used the block editor (BEDIT command) to modify the table to match what was configured at step 1.
3. Set the template location - if using the default location and template DWGs, this step is not needed. If the revision block templates are to be stored on a shared drive, or a specific company template will be used instead of the vaac_RevBlockMetric/Imperial ones, the exe.config file must be changed accordingly. This file is found in the AutoCAD installation folder:
In the <AppSettings> section, add the following key (to specify the metric template):
<add key="VltRevBlockMetricTemplate" value="TemplateLocation\MetricTemplate.dwg"/>
Or the key below for an imperial one:
<add key="VltRevBlockImperialTemplate" value=" TemplateLocation\ImperialTemplate.dwg "/>
After restarting the AutoCAD based application, the change will take effect and the specified revision block will be used.
4. Add a revision table in the drawing template – it is best to add the table to the .DWT file so that there is no need to place it on a per drawing basis. Use the VLTREVBLOCK to bring in the revision table, then save the drawing template. All new drawings using this template will then include the revision table and as the file is released, Vault property values will populate it.
If there is any information that is not managed by Vault, it may be included in the revision block as additional columns. Values may be added manually using the BEDIT command for the vaac_RevBlock instance. To note that any manual entries/edits to columns that are mapped to Vault properties will be overwritten when the Vault revision table update occurs.