- [Narrator] In an earlier video,
where we went through the Windows Explorer Interface
for SOLIDWORKS PDM, we took a look at searching using PDM.
At this point I want to go back to that search
and do a little bit more complete discussion
about how you do the searches and what you can do
to edit searches and create custom searches.
Let's start by just getting into PDM
and starting the open search.
You can see here that it's looking in this vault,
if I wanted to I could browse it to look in other vaults
or specific parts of the assembly.
For example, I'm going to look
in just this assembly folder location.
I'm going to look for a name that has LT in the name,
in the description I'm going to leave that blank
and the number I'm going to leave that blank.
Let's go ahead and search and see what we get there.
We can see down below,
and we've got a number of files here,
and it shows us where it's found in.
We can filter that out even more,
if we want to add more definition here.
We can do LT zero, and you can see now it only searched
for things that have a combination of LT and a zero in it,
but you'll notice that all my LT parts that I had
before I did the zero search, all went away.
I'm going to do that one more time.
See how now all those parts weren't there before?
This search is a little bit specific,
you should only put in partials of a name
or one thing at a time to do your search.
You can further filter out by description,
maybe you type in a word down here
and run it again and you find that,
okay now with LT and the description
of flange we can find this part,
because in it's description it has the flange value.
I'll just take a look at that here.
Very cool, but pretty finicky, if you don't know exactly
what you're searching for, you might add a number of things.
For example, I could of put in LT and 016 and done a search,
I do get that, but sometimes because
it's a partial in a row, it doesn't like it.
If I had a space in here, for example,
you can see that that search gives me some varied results.
Running it a few different ways is always a good idea,
it doesn't work like you'd think a Google
or a simple word search would work,
so it can be a little bit finicky.
It is looking at the name of the file.
Sometimes it's easier to search
by description or a part number.
Let's move on from this tab and look at some newer things.
We can search by project, so let's say that...
Let's expand this a little bit so we can see better.
Let's say for example, I'm working LT.
You can see here I have no numbers in the LT.
That's the different part number than we had before.
In the description we can search by flange, for example.
Now, because that LT part that I was looking at before,
had flange in the descriptor, I was able to pull that up.
This is a little different way to do it,
but again using stuff that's in your cards.
You can search by variables.
If you want to search by approve by,
to get a list of things that are approved, or by cost,
by date, by who did it, or by description,
again we can add description here, text contains,
and I'm going to put flange one more time,
hit that play button to start my search.
It's going to go through and check all the variables for flange
and there you go, it popped up our search results again.
You can add a combination of variables here.
Let's say if you have a huge vault
and you're trying to search for a very specific thing,
or if you have a product line series,
where, for example, like the master car parts of
very thorough descriptions, things like that,
it can be really useful.
You can do it by checked in, check out.
If you're going to do some updates
and you want to find out what files are checked out,
you can go in here and see who's got what checked out.
I can search by myself and see
what files I have checked out.
Right now I shouldn't have any, and that's correct.
If we go and look at our admin, for example,
we're going to find a bunch of files come up checked out.
But, for this case we've just got this one right now,
I must of just checked in some files.
You can also tweak this to display checked out files,
to display non checked out files,
it all depends on what the status is of everything,
but it's a good way to do you're search.
You can also search by version data,
so if you put in those comments and they're very specific,
you can search by user and
what version they put in the comment.
Again, you can search by work flows,
so if something's been approved,
you can search by that, none approved yet,
this is a new vault so we're going to have to go through that.
You can also search by labels, history, and content.
A lot of different ways to search.
One thing you can do is save this search.
This specific search that I set up here,
I can add to my favorites and I can make it available
for all users, and they can even edit it.
We're going to do the LT flange.
So, now when I come over here, you'll notice
that the LT flange is one of the first favorites.
Let's say I go back to my main vault,
go back into search, nothing here.
I can go to my favorites and put a LT flange,
and you can see it atomically changes the search,
and makes that come up.
And that search option, because I made it available
to everyone else, will be available
to the other users as well.
You can also save out your search results
in the item explorer, but this is a little bit
more advanced, I wouldn't get into this necessarily,
you can just know that it's there.
That basically covers all the ways that
you can search through solid works in the EPDM tool.
Like I said, it's a little bit finicky,
it's not the best search tool every,
but if you have very full descriptions,
accurate part names, accurate part numbers,
and make sure you that you use the number attribute,
you'll be able to search and find all of these items.