If your company uses Vault Workgroup or Professional for File Lifecycle Management, you may have noticed an icon on the Preview panel that looks like the follow screen shot. When you select it the arrow either points up or down and you see something about "Non-Released Biased" or "Released Biased. You may wonder what these conditions mean or do with your data selection.
To explain these conditions, we will use an small Inventor assembly. You will notice that the assembly and its associated parts are in a "Released" lifecycle state. The revision scheme being used in alphabetic.
Some time passes and it is decided that a Word document needs to be attached to the assembly that contains supplies needed for shipment. The Word document is already released and has a revision level of "2". By category all Word documents use a numeric revision scheme. The Inventor assembly model lifecycle state is changed to "Work in Progress" and the revision level is bumped to "B" then the Word document is attached.
The assembly state is returned to "Released. Looking at the "Uses" tab we see the attachment on the "Latest Released" of the assembly. Notice the icon is pointing down which indicated a Non-Released Biased" condition.
If the revision level "A" is selected, the icon changes to a "Released Biased" and you will notice the attachment of the Word document is missing. The Vault is remembering that you did not have any attachments to the assembly when it was at revision "A".
Some time has passed and the Word document goes through a revision cycle to add some extra shipping supplies needed for another assembly. When the Word document is changed back to "Work in Progress" the revision is bumped to "3". You worry this may create a problem because this will change the shipping supplies document attached to the previous assembly but the Vault takes care of this issue. While the Word document is in a "Work in Progress" state, you click the icon to change it to "Released Biased" and the correct version of the attached document is display for the latest version of the assembly. Revision "2" was the version of the Word document released with the latest released version of the assembly.
If the "Non-Released Bias" option is selected, the attached document is version "3" for the latest release assembly.
Once the Word document is re-released, the latest revision of the assembly uses the current document version. If you select a previous release of assembly you will see the correct document revision assigned. Below are two screen shots showing these two selections.
This idea holds true for the assembly parts as well. Time as passed and some of the parts have been revised at different times. Below are two screen shots showing the latest release state of the assembly and a previous revision state. Compare the revision levels of the parts and you will see that the Vault has maintained the correct revisions per assembly revision.
This ability of the Vault to remember which revision states for parts and attachments according to the revision level of the assembly is far more trustworthy than our own memory. As time passes we can still return to the Vault, select the desired assembly revision level and then use Pack and Go to retrieve all the parts and attachments that were current at that time.
There will be times when you would like to change the revision level of an assembly attachment to a different level. This process starts by changing the assembly to a "Work in Progress" state then while the assembly is selected, pick the "Attachments" command. In the dialog box simply select the desired attachment revision to be hooked the assembly. You could even return to a previous revision of the attachment. Once selected, pick "OK" and finally change the assembly lifecycle back to "Released".