Desktop Integration Preferences

You can customize Windchill Desktop Integration functionality based on preference settings in both the Preference Management utility and the Configuration menu. For information on the preferences available from the Configuration menu, see Servers and Configuration.

Several preferences are specific to Windchill Desktop Integration (DTI), but several other preferences affect content behavior elsewhere in Windchill. For information on all preferences affecting documents, see Content Management Preferences.

From the Navigator, select Utilities under a specific context, organization, or site. Click Preference Management under the Business Administration utility category.

In the tables below, “Visibility” indicates the lowest level at which the preference can be set. For example, “Site” means that only site administrators can view or set the preference. “User” means that an individual user, context administrator, organization administrator, and site administrator can view or set the preference. However, your local administrators might change the default preference visibility.

To change a preference, select Set Preference from the right-click actions menu of the preference you want to change. For more information, see Setting a Preference.

The Attachments preference group determines general upload and download behavior when working with Windchill content, including Microsoft Office documents as well as any other downloadable file types.

The download preferences in Windchill are not applicable to Windows Explorer Integration.

Default

My Documents

Visibility

User

Description

Location in which downloaded files are saved on your local machine. The default location is set to your My Documents folder or is otherwise determined by your local operating system. For information on downloading documents with Desktop Integration, see Default File Path and Your Local Cache.

To manually set this preference, use a separator character after the final directory. For example:

C:\MyFolder\

rather than

C:\MyFolder

Default

Always ask

Visibility

User

Description

Determines whether you are prompted to open or save downloaded files, or whether these actions are performed automatically.

There are three options for this setting:

• Always ask whether to open or save a downloaded file

• Always save file to user-selected directory

• Always open file in application

Set this preference to Always open file in application when using Desktop Integration. A local file is automatically saved to your default file path every time you access a Windchill document. For more information, see Opening Documents with Desktop Integration.

Default

Basic browser functionality

Visibility

User

Description

Set this preference to Use Windchill Desktop Integration functionality to download files to ensure Windchill actions and attributes function correctly when using DTI.

Set this preference before using Windchill Desktop Integration. If this preference has not been set, then the DTI plugin does not recognize documents that you have downloaded from the Windchill web application. As a result, many Windchill actions (such as Check In and Check Out) are disabled for these documents.

Default	Yes
Visibility	Organization
Description	If you set the File Download Mechanism preference to Use Windchill Desktop Integration functionality to download files but have not installed the DTI plugin on your local machine, then this preference controls whether you are allowed to download documents without first installing the plugin. When set to Yes, users must download the DTI plugin before preceding.

Default	No
Visibility	User
Description	When you check in a document from the Windchill menu in a Microsoft Office application, the document automatically closes once the checkin is complete. To keep the document open, you can select the Keep document open checkbox that appears in the checkin window. This preference controls whether Keep document open is selected by default.

Default

Visibility

User

Description

When you check in or create a new Windchill document from the file you are authoring, you are given the option to automatically delete the local version of that file. The file is only deleted after you upload and check it in to Windchill. This preference controls whether Send local file to Recycle Bin is selected by default.

If you open a document from Windchill without checking it out and back in, a local version remains saved until you manually delete it. For more information, see Default File Path and Your Local Cache.

Default	Recently Accessed and Favorites
Visibility	User
Description	Determines the default list of contexts you see when expanding the Windchill Documents node in Windows Explorer: • Recently Accessed + Favorites • Recently Accessed • Favorites • All To mark a context as your favorite, navigate to the context table in Windchill. For example, to set your favorite projects, open the Navigator and click the project icon . Click View All to open the Projects table. This table lists all projects in which you are a member or have access. Select the checkboxes next to your favorite projects and click the add to favorites icon on the table toolbar.

Default	Yes
Visibility	Organization
Description	Determines whether editable attribute fields appear when checking in a document using Desktop Integration. When set to Yes, the checkin window includes an additional Set Attributes step (requiring you to click Next before completing the checkin operation). When set to No, users are only prompted to enter an optional checkin comment.