Following up on last week's blog post about our Vault Metadata Export and Update, I got a lot of questions about the Batch Rename tool built into our 2017 version of the tools. What this essentially does is allows a sweeping change to your filenames when you have issues arising such as duplicates or inconsistently named files. In order to process our batch rename you must first get an extraction from Vault of your filenames in which you can perform your own duplicate search with Excel formulas quite easily. I normally will sort my files by filename and then perform an OR statement to identify if they are duplicates or not.
In order to specifically identify a file in Vault you should concatenate the path and filename together. So my extract from Vault usually contains File Path and Filename and then this formula to put it together in the same cell: =concatenate(A2,"/",B2) where column A is the file path and column B is the filename.
Once you have your files separated out that you want to rename you have to have the new concatenated filename in column A and your new filename for that file in column B. This is easiest to do as just a copy and paste into another workbook or sheet in Excel. Now that you have this you are ready to process the Batch Rename through the IMAGINiT Vault Server Utilities Metadata Update tool. Do yourself a solid though and do it on a sample set until you validated your approach was spot on. Autodesk Vault will rename that file and any references it is used in will be repaired as if you did it manually in Vault. The benefit this tools brings is that you do not have to do each rename through the Vault rename tool as that could be painstaking long and arduous.
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