No way to globally attach Linked Documents to Parts

[wrussott]

I've recently encountered an issue with Upchain that's preventing me from using the documents the way I would like. Unless I'm missing something, I hope this can be corrected.

I'm using Upchain to store BOMs of circuit board assemblies at my company. Many of the components in these boards belong to a series (resistors, capacitors, connectors, etc.) and these components have a common datasheet for the entire series of components. When attaching datasheets to these parts, I figure it would be inefficient and wasteful to upload the same document repeatedly for all these components (thereby generating duplicate DC numbers in the system). I would rather only have a single copy of the document in the system, which I can link to these components. Upchain has a link system, but it is not working as I will explain.

What I've done is create a Project called "Common Documents" which is to serve as a repository for series datasheets and the like. My hope is to share these documents with projects that need them, which I'm able to do just fine.

As you can see I've shared this document with another project which contains a PCB. The document shows up no issue in Linked documents. I would then like to attach this to all Molex Micro-Fit connectors used in my PCB.

In my project's Electrical BOM, I then go to attach the linked datasheet using the Linked documents feature as shown:

However, this Linked document that was shared and made available to the project, is not showing up when I attempt to attach it this way. The screenshot below shows what I am seeing, just "General documents" for the given project.

The way this is currently set up, the scope of shared documents is global only to the project the parts are contained in. I would hope documents could be stored globally so I can use them for all my projects, and not have to upload fresh every time, thereby generating duplicate DC numbers, which while possible (as I could have up to 1,000,000 DC numbers), is terrible bookkeeping.

[rich_walters]

We could have the same problem. We are still in migration sandbox. Could you set up a parent project to all your other projects and assign the document to the parent project? Not sure if that would filter down to lower level projects. Let me know if you find a solution! Post a feature request for this on the Idea Board if you have not and I'll vote on it. 

[wrussott]

Hi Rich, thanks for the suggestion. I went ahead and tried it, but unfortunately still having the same issues. I think I'll go ahead and create the Feature Request for this. 

Here's the details of what I tried:  First I created two projects, "Test Project" and "Test Project 3", both are Design Projects. I made both Active. Then, I made "Test Project" the parent of "Test Project 3" as you can see below:

I have a document in Test Project named DC006772 (some datasheet) that you might expect to show up in Test Project 3's documents, since it's a subproject, but it doesn't. I then tried sharing the document with Test Project 3, which as you can see below, works without issue.

Since this Linked Document is now available to my Test Project 3, I'd expect it would be available to all the parts in Test Project 3. But once again I run into the same. I create an item in the BOM, attempt to attach a Linked Document, and get the following:

There is no Linked Documents folder when I try to add my Linked documents.

[glenHBRXX]

Just ran into the same limitation.  Docs shared to project cannot be linked to items in that project.   Some messy workaround could be avoided if an item in project A could link with a doc in project B