Hi there,

I am using SolidWorks 2009 with the PDM Workgroup system.  I have set up  all my parts with about 20 custom properties, and would like to be able  to search using these properties.

I generally search for my parts using the description field, and this  has been working great.  For the first time today, I wanted to search  for a specific supplier (customer property field "Supplier1").  There  were zero matches, even though there should have been many (hundreds?)  results.  Then I searched for some other custom properties, and could  not find any matches either, even though I knew for sure there should be  many results.  Clearly, the custom properties are saved with the part,  because I can see that information in the document properties dialog  from within the PDM Workgroup interface, so this is not the problem.   However, I cannot search for them.

I just found a round-about (take a very long time!!) to make it work.  A  while back, I noticed that all custom property fields would turn up  with three "square" characters in the field when generating a search  report.  If I were to take ownership of a file directly from within the  search report, then ALL custom properties from ALL files would be  properly filled in.  I found this strange, but it didn't cause a problem  at the time.  What I did just now was generate a search report for ALL  files in the vault, and then took ownership of the first one.  After  about 5 minutes, all the custom property fields were filled in  properly.  Then I clicked "refine search" to edit the search to look for  only the supplier I wanted from the "Supplier1" field.  The search  results page updated correctly, and I had the list the I was originally  looking for.  Of course, this is simply filtering the original results,  so if I wanted to search for a new custom property, I have to start all  over again.  And once I closed the window, and did another search, the  custom property fields were filled with three "square" characters once  again, and I could not search for any custom properties again.

How can I fix this?  It appears that the only fields I can properly  search for are: Document, Number, Description, Revision, Owner, Project,  and Configurations.  These are the default and base fields required by  PDM Workgroup.  All custom properties are not available for search  without the above crazy procedure.  Any thoughts?

Stephen