I have an odd request and I'm trying to see how to make it work out.  I have a manager requesting if we can put non-CAD files through our CAD revision workflow.  We certainly can, that's a simple trick of adjusting the categories we use to sort files into our workflows.

The challenge is that we have conditions on our workflow that prevent people from submitting files for approval if, say, the Description or the Material fields in the data card are left blank.  I don't want to be so picky as to force my users to fill out properties for all configurations, so I limit my transition conditions to apply to the '@' configuration.  (I type '@' in the Configuration/Path column for my transition conditions)

But this gets tricky trying to add non-SW files to our CAD approval workflow.  Other file formats (like PDF, or XLSX files) don't produce any configuration names (all of their variables are to ConfigurationID = 1 when you look in the VariableValues table in SQL, which has a 'null' name associated with it).  If I add a PDF or XLSX file to my workflow, they fail the conditions even if the card is filled out since none of the conditions are in the '@' configuration.

Offhand, I think my options are:

1. Tell the manager that we can only control native SW files through our workflow (if only this answer would work on said manager)
2. Find a way to have my conditions apply to configurations named '@' OR [null]
3. Get rid of our variable conditions on our CAD workflow (I personally despise this solution)
4. Put all of our non-SW files through a separate revision controlled workflow
5. Find a way to force PDM to put all of the variables for PDF/XLSX/etc. files onto an '@' configuration instead of a [null] configuration.  (ConfigurationID = 2 instead of ConfigurationID = 1)

I don't know if options 2 or 5 are even possible (are they? has anyone done that?)... I'm guessing I'm stuck with option 3.