If you move documents from one location to another, the links to these documents could break. How to use LinkMgmt.txt to resolve this broken links?
SolutionIf you move documents from one location to another, the links to these documents could break. Solid Edge provides an ASCII text file that contains information to help you resolve links for documents. LinkMgmt.txt contains information that allows you to specify search orders and a search algorithm that defines the folders to search when resolving the link.
By default, LinkMgmt.txt is located in the Solid Edge Preferences folder e.g., “C:\Program Files\Siemens\Solid Edge 2023\Preferences\LinkMgmt.txt”. You can also specify that Solid Edge look for the LinkMgmt.txt file in a different folder, including a folder on another machine in the network. To do this, on the File menu, click Settings > Options. On the File Locations tab of the Solid Edge Options dialog box, select Link Management, and click Modify. On the Browse dialog box, specify the drive and folder containing LinkMgmt.txt.
The LinkMgmt.txt file is read when you open documents. Changes to the LinkMgmt.txt file do not affect any currently opened documents. You should close and reopen documents for new changes to LinkMgmt.txt to take effect.
You can use a text editor, such as Notepad, to edit the file. Review the following sample LinkMgmt.txt file.
CONTAINER
RELATIVE
ABSOLUTE
BEGIN SEARCH PATH
C:\My Documents
\\machine123\My Documents
END SEARCH PATH
The keywords, CONTAINER, RELATIVE, and ABSOLUTE indicate the method and order in which links are resolved. CONTAINER looks for the files in the same folder as the container document. RELATIVE looks for the files relative to the container document at the time of placement or save. ABSOLUTE looks for the exact path for the files at the time of placement or save.
You may want to reorder or remove the keywords from the LinkMgmt.txt file to improve the performance of resolving the links. Note that because file location paths are hard-coded into the Solid Edge file, removing ABSOLUTE will not break this hard-coded file name behaviour. All the ABSOLUTE keyword will do is allow you to control the order that Solid Edge will attempt to search and locate the files in relation to the other keyword search criteria. Removing ABSOLUTE cannot be used to break the hard-coded linking to the files.
If you do not know where the linked documents exist, you can add search paths to the LinkMgmt.txt file. The folders listed between the keywords BEGIN SEARCH PATH and END SEARCH PATH are used to look for the links. Solid Edge recursively searches the subfolders of the specified folders. Once a document of the same name is found, the link is resolved. When a file exists in more than one location, Solid Edge reports the file in the last path in the list.
You should only use SEARCH PATH if links cannot be resolved using the conventional methods of CONTAINER, RELATIVE, or ABSOLUTE. If you have SEARCH PATH in the LinkMgmt.txt file, Solid Edge will search these folders for the documents, which could cause an unnecessary impact on performance. To stop using SEARCH PATH, you can edit, delete, or rename the LinkMgmt.txt file.
There are two additional keywords available to you in the LinkMgmt.txt file that are not provided out-of-the-box – MAP and NO_LINK_RESOLUTION.
MAP replaces a portion of the old path with a new one. This is more effective than SEARCH PATH, especially with large folders since SEARCH PATH recursively traverses and caches all the files in the folder when Solid Edge starts. The format for MAP is as follows where pairs of lines in the MAP section describe the old path portion that needs to be replaced with the new path name.
CONTAINER
RELATIVE
ABSOLUTE
BEGIN SEARCH PATH
END SEARCH PATH
BEGIN MAP
\\my_old_server\old_folder\
C:\new_folder_path\
END MAP
NO_LINK_RESOLUTION prevents any kind of link resolution. All links fail to bind with this setting. It is generally used when using Design Manager API or handling a large number of files where even default link resolution/binding is a performance issue.