‘Twas the night after my EPDM 2010 upgrade and all through my house
not a peripheral was stirring not even my Logitech High Performance Laser mouse.

When I clicked upon my start menu what didn’t appear?
‘Twasn’t my EPDM Search button oh how the end seemed near!

I picked up the phone, so lively and quick
technical support I called -the loss of this function made me sick.

I banged my head and was making a frown
when the sad new that it was permanently gone came down.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear
but Engineering Data Specialist Man and eight tiny reindeer!

A bundle of batch files he had flung on his back
He looked like a genius opening his pack.

He spoke not a word and went straight to his work
and created this batch file and put it in the Taskbar with a jerk.

He sprang to his ‘98 Escort reminding his team to not be late
and I heard his curse softly as his keys fell into the sewer grate.

But I heard him exclaim as he walked down the culdesac
“Turn in an enhancement request, maybe they will bring it back!”

The searching powers of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM are pretty cool. (What did you expect, it is built on SQL)

Did you know you can get pretty fancy with just simple Enterprise searches?

Here are some points to remember:

• * – is a wildcard character that can stand for any number of characters
• ? – is a wildcard character that can stand one character
• the space character means OR, if you don’t want the space to act like an OR use quotation marks
• Searches are not case sensitive

You can use as many wildcards as you wish in a search. The search function will assume your entry is enclosed inside of asterisks unless you actually type a wildcard character. Thus “J” returns the same as “*J*”, “J*” returns the same as “J*”.

Here are some examples of what files are returned if you enter different values in the file name box in a search:

This logic works with any Enterprise variable, not just file names. As an example “3?? S.Steel” in the material text box would return all parts made from 304 S.Steel or 316 S.Steel.