In November, I taught a class at Autodesk University. I enjoy the experience of speaking at AU, and I always seems to learn more teaching classes than I do taking them. This year was no exception. My topic was on dealing with large Vault filestores and databases, and most of my focus was on the administration side. I wanted to make sure that I was including information that would benefit the end user, and I ran across the topic of run-time calculated properties.
If you are not familiar with Vault property types, here is a quick review:
System properties are ones that are pulled directly from the files. This would be properties such as file size, creation date, file type, etc. These properties are read-only and cannot be edited.
User defined properties are usually linked to files, but instead of pointing to the statistics of the files they are linked to file metadata or iProperties. It is possible to edit these properties.
System properties and user defined properties get extracted from the files placed in vault and indexed in the Vault database. This makes searching for files very easy since the search terms look through the database and not through the files.
There is another type of property that works differently than either of these two. Run-time calculated properties are generated by accessing files on disk and comparing them to the files in Vault. Any files that a user has checked out and are in the working folder are compared the their corresponding entry in the database. Three of these properties on in the default view.
- Vault Status
- Entity Icon
- Vault Status Modifier
Users may never notice these properties. However, if users that have a thousands of files in each folder will notice that the properties grid and file display take a long time to generate. That is because Vault is checking each entry to see if there is a file in the working folder. If there is a file in the working folder, Vault will compare the generate the status icons at that time.
These properties can simply be removed from the view, like any other property. Removing the properties may speed up user's experience when browsing folders with large sets of files.
For example, I have clients that have thousands of files in a single folder. When they click on the folder, it could take minutes for before any information is displayed. Turning off these run-time generated properties reducing that time to seconds.
You can always turn them back on if you want to, so experimentation is encouraged!
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