I am working on creating some custom EPDM reports. The point is to have workflow states set a date during certain transitions. This would allow a report to look through the vault and pull the info on any file that has been in one of these states for more that 7 days - for example.

For this I created some variables and set the workflow transitions to update the corresponding variable with triggered. When the next state is triggered it removes the value from the previous data variable. Then, the report would no longer find it in error. The problem with both regular and version free variables is that when the state transition happens version 5 has date 2014-03-26 and the new version 6 has the date 1900-01-01 in it. The 1900 date is not a problem as I can write the SQL query to ignore it.The problem is that version 5 is still picked up and reported on.

Why does the version free variable get left behind in the data base? I would think it would update the version number so that it only maintained one line for that variable. Well, I guess 2 or more lines since it insists on having a line for each configuration, even if you don't use configurations and every part always has 2 configurations.

Why do I have to put variables on the data card in order to actually modify them with the state transition? I don't want them on the data card, I just want it a background thing.

Why doesn't the card editor box for "Show in Explorer" turn off the text box when unchecked? Why can't you resize the card to something smaller that the area that has the boxes you don't want to show?

If you have the Updates all configurations option selected, why does it still make 2 lines in the data base?

Here is a screenshot of the database listing after the first state.

Then again after transitioning to the next state.

If I go onto the data card and modify the variable it functions correctly and just updates the date and does not require checkout.

But, it does go through and create 2 line items for each version of the file.

How is this helpful?

In this view from the query I am getting 2 file to show up twice because they have the old date for Review state in version 5 and the new date in version 6 for the approver state.

We are currently using EPDM 2013 SP3.0 with SolidWorks 2013 SP3.0.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.