Publishing Engine Support for Windchill VCS Publishing
Overview
Visualization Content Service (VCS) is a multi-client software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that publishes data for Windchill+. As VCS is a multi-client service, it allows multiple Windchill clients to be simultaneously connected. VCS can publish Arbortext data, including Dynamic Documents, Information Structures, and Publication Structures, to multiple output formats.
The objective of Visualization Content Service is to eliminate the configuration, upgrade, and maintenance activities that a customer must perform for the on-premises publishing infrastructure. Users do not need to install and configure Arbortext Publishing Engine because it is managed by VCS.
Enabling VCS Publishing
To enable VCS publishing from Windchill+, you must update your publishing rules in Windchill+.
An example of a param-set is added in the Arbortext SamplePublishingRules.xml file.
See the Windchill+ Help topic Examples of Publish Rules XML files for more information.
Deploying Publishing Engine custom folders or application folders in Windchill for VCS
If you have Publishing Engine customizations that need to be deployed for VCS publishing, then follow these steps:
1. Compress all custom folders and application folders from your Publishing Engine installation to a zip folder. You must name the custom folders as custom1, custom2, custom3 and so on. If you have only one custom folder, then name it as custom1. You do not need to include the PTC-supplied application folders (com.ptc.arbortext.service and com.ptc.arbortext.techinfo).
2. Name this compressed zip folder as PECustom.zip. It is crucial that the folder is named in this way.
3. Add this PECustom.zip to another zip folder that will work as an outer layer when adding to Windchill. This outer folder can have any name. This .zip folder can be added at Site level or at Context level in Windchill.
4. For adding at Site level in Windchill, go to > > .
For adding at context level, go to the Utilities of the context.
5. Click > and upload the outer zip folder.
If you have custom fonts, add them to the fonts folder in one of the custom folders in the PECustom.zip folder.
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If you have configured 2-way-metadata synchronization, then the CopyMetadataConfig file must be placed in the lib folder of one of the custom folders in the PECustom.zip folder.
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Troubleshooting VCS Publishing
When using VCS for publishing, you cannot use a transaction archive for accessing the payload and the returned log files. The payload is stored at a shared Azure Blob storage specified for this purpose. See Windchill+ Help Section Service Publishing Setup for more information.
Logging of information of successful VCS publishing jobs is controlled by the vcs-capture-logs property. See Windchill+ Help topic Service Worker Parameters for more information.
The logs can be downloaded from the shared Azure blob storage.
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