I'm having a weird artifact show up with my users working with legacy data in our vault.

The core of the issue comes down to PDM variables being linked to a Property not updating to a null value if said property is deleted from the SW custom properties list.

Example:

• A user checks in a file with an "incorrect" description in the Default configuration-specific properties.
• User checks the file out, and:
  • Adds the correct Description to the Custom Properties / @ tab.  
  • The user often does this via the Custom Properties window in lieu of the data card so they can have a linked text expression: making the Description linked to model dimensions.
  • Deletes the "incorrect" description (not just the value, but the property itself) off of the Default configuration.
• Upon Check-In:
  • The @ tab of the data card shows the corrected Description.
  • The Default tab still shows the old value.  When the config-specific "Description" property is deleted, it appears to make no change to that value in that config of the data card, in lieu of replacing it with a null value.

Not really a big deal as far as SW is concerned (properties in .slddrw title blocks and BOM tables still function as expected).  But it has been creating a lot of false positives when my users search for things based on descriptions or use the PDM BOM, Contains, and Where Used.

I could use "update across all configurations" in the data card, but that's really only a good workaround for static descriptions entered via the data card.  For linked descriptions using text expressions in the SW Custom Properties window, this requires our users to make redundant copies of the custom text expression anywhere that they see a Description property.

If a file is missing a SW property, but PDM has a value written into the underlying SQL VariableValues table, I can check out a part and use Modify → Update → File Attributes From Database to make sure that the SW properties match what's in PDM's SQL tables.

But unless I'm mistaken, I don't see an option to go in the other direction: If the SW file is missing the property, ensure that the SQL VariableValues table doesn't have an entry for that particular Variable after it's been checked in with that variable previously.

What am I missing?