I recently returned from the first Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 Hands-On-Workshop hosted in Grand Rapids, MI where we had a pretty good turn out of about 30 users. There were several questions pertaining to migration from this audience. I thought it would be a good idea to periodically post some of these questions and answers in my blog, as I imagine many of you have similar questions….

Q. Can you delete user defined attributes (UDA) set in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x when using the data migration tool?

A. The Pro/INTRALINK Data Migrator requires that all user defined attributes coming from Pro/INTRALINK 3.x are mapped to a corresponding attribute in the target 8.0 system. This rigid rule is in place to maintain data integrity during the migration. If an attribute is missing then this is incomplete data and has the potential to corrupt your data. There is some flexibility here in that you can map these UDAs to attributes in 8.0 that are of a different name, as long as the types are the same (i.e. string to string). However, it is not recommended that such flexibility be leverage when working with file-based attributes, as they are associated to designated parameter in the Pro/ENGINEER files.

This is how things behave currently. However, since the release of 8.0 we have heard several requests to relax this constraint to allow for the filtering out of attributes in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x during the migration process as they are no longer in use. It is something that we are currently investigating for a future release. Note, that if such flexibility were provided the responsibility would then be on the user (migration administrator), not the migration software, to determine whether the loss of this information or the potential impact on the Pro/ENGINEER files is acceptable.

If you would like to provide your thoughts on this subject, please chime in on the Discussion Forum.

Best,

Steve