Working With Attachment Fields

Your administrator determines the types of items that can have attachments. By default, attachments display in the Attachments panel, but may also display on other panels depending on how your administrator has defined the item type.

Depending on how your administrator defined the attachments field you may not be able to edit attachments. Conversely, your administrator may have set it up so multiple users can edit items and their related artifacts. To see your changes and the changes of others, you may need to refresh the window.

• By default, Windchill RV&S allows attachments to be a maximum file size of 4 MB. Your administrator may define a higher or lower limit depending on the requirements of your system. Large attachments may affect performance.

• A summary is editable for an attachment only when the attachment is added to an item initially. You cannot edit a summary after you complete the operation.

• Attachments can be added or edited as rich content depending on how your administrator set it up. For more information, see “Working With Rich Content Fields”.

• If you are using the Windchill RV&S GUI or Web interface, you must manually remove and re-add attachments to update the attachment version. When you manually remove and re-add an attachment in a single operation, Windchill RV&S records that operation as Attachments Updated in the item history. The existing attachment is always replaced whether or not it has changed.

The comparison of attachments is based on a message dialog algorithm (MD5) which relies on a checksum to calculate and compare the size of the attachment files. This comparison method is not guaranteed to work in all cases and it is possible to have collisions between two different attachments that are identical in size. While such collisions are rare, to avoid any possibility of collisions when using the im editissue command, you can manually update the attachments using the addAttachment and removeAttachment command options.

• You can also add an attachment using drag-and-drop. From your desktop or from Windows Explorer, drag the file you want to attach to an item in the Items view or Item Detail view.

• Attachment file names containing an ampersand (&) are stored as %26 by Windchill RV&S, even if the attachments are added through rich content fields or as a link.

Task	Procedure
Open an attachment	In the GUI, right-click the attachment, then select Open. In the Web interface, click the attachment name link.
Save an attachment	Right-click the attachment you want to save, then select Save As.
Add an attachment	Click next to the attachment field. Enter the path and name of the file to attach, or browse to select a file. Click Open.
Replace an attachment (GUI only)	Right-click the attachment you want to replace, then select Replace. Enter the path and name of the file to attach, or browse to select a file. Click Open.
Delete/Remove an attachment	Select the attachment you want to remove and click .