If any of you are not practicing engineers, you've probably had conversations with engineers when your eyes started to glaze over and you wished you had brought your secret decoder ring to unjumble the slew of TLA (three letter acronyms) that they threw in your direction. Like just about any professional discipline, engineers have a language all their own. Luckily, the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK has a built-in translator to help your non-engineering users get by (of course with a little prodding and coaxing by you, the Administrator).

Much of the valuable search information in Pro/INTRALINK comes in the form of Attribute values that have been passed directly from Pro/ENGINEER parameters into Pro/INTRALINK. Pro/INTRALINK 3.x allowed this type of functionality, but it always required that the Attribute name be the same as the Pro/ENGINEER parameter name to allow the two systems to communicate. If you're happy with that, you already have the tools you need with the blog I posted on Introducing Pro/INTRALINK to Pro/ENGINEER. However, if you would like to build in an attribute name translator, read on.

The method used above and in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x is called implicit attribute mapping. Adding in a translator is a process called explicit attribute mapping. For instance, let's say your engineering group has set up the Pro/ENGINEER start parts to include a designated parameter called "STK_MAT" and you want Pro/INTRALINK to name the attribute "Stock_Material". To enable this, you simply have to do the following:

1. Make sure STK_MAT is a designated attribute in Pro/ENGINEER.
2. Create the Attribute "Stock_Material" in Pro/INTRALINK (through the Attribute Definition Manager)
3. Associate the "Stock_Material" attribute to the CAD Document (through the Type Manager)
4. Add a line to the iba.properties file using the Windchill shell tool with the command:

• xconfmanager –t codebase/com/ptc/windchill/uwgm/proesrv/attribute/iba.properties -s STK_MAT="Stock_Material" -p

Once you restart your server and check in a Pro/ENGINEER file with that designated parameter, you'll be pleased to see that Pro/INTRALINK has translated geek-speak for the masses. You can find additional information on this process in the Mapping Pro/ENGINEER Parameters to Windchill Instance-Based Attributes section of the Windchill System Administration Guide.

I hope you can put this to use in your environment. Let me know if you have any questions in the Administration Forum.