One Search Across Two PDM Systems, Built as a Custom ONEPART Connector
A NETVIBES (EXALEAD) ONEPART connector developed for SmarTeam and SOLIDWORKS ePDM, with access-control-aware extraction, indexing, and a mashup interface for search and CAD download.
An oil and gas customer
At a glance
- Industry
- Oil and gas
- Platform
- 3DEXPERIENCE
- Our role
- Connector development
The challenge and what we did
The challenge
- Diverse data formats and sources across the PDM systems made retrieval inefficient.
- The PDM systems had to satisfy complex customer requirements, from product structure through to security concepts.
- Industry-specific tailoring — the customer required specialised search-based applications for efficient data search and aggregation.
What we did
- Built data extraction logic tailored to SmarTeam and ePDM metadata.
- Developed access control list extraction logic, so permissions and user access carried through rather than being reapplied.
- Created a dedicated EXALEAD plug-in integrating with both SmarTeam and ePDM.
- Used the API to publish data for indexing, covering documents, libraries, projects, CAD files, BOM structure and ACLs.
- Developed a mashup interface presenting SmarTeam and ePDM data together, including the ability to download CAD files.
What we found
Engineering data was held in two separate PDM systems, SmarTeam and SOLIDWORKS ePDM, in different formats and with different security models. Finding something meant knowing which system it was in. What the customer needed was not another repository but a search layer that could reach across both — and one that respected the permissions already defined in each, rather than exposing everything to everyone.
What we built
Extraction logic was written specifically for SmarTeam and ePDM metadata, with a parallel piece of work to extract the access control lists so that permissions travelled with the data. A dedicated EXALEAD plug-in handled the integration with both systems, and the API published the extracted content — documents, libraries, projects, CAD files, BOM structure and ACLs — for indexing. On top of that sits a mashup interface showing data from both systems side by side, with CAD files downloadable directly from the results.
Filed under
- 3DEXPERIENCE
- Oil & Gas
- NETVIBES
- EXALEAD ONEPART
- PLM Analytics
- SmarTeam
- SOLIDWORKS ePDM
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