David,
You are correct in that there are 2 problems, but you can't start to address the 2nd problem of opening the data unless you get the data out of the Pro/I vault. Since Pro/I has all the smarts embedded in the database, we're trying to take that out of the equation and reduce it to a least common denominator using the dependency report. Of course our archive will include the Pro/I database, but if we can't get it working and/or are only looking to restore a specific version of an assembly, the dependency report + all object report (both made just prior to archive) will be just what we need.
Tom
I kind of understand what you're trying to do ~ get data into a format that native Pro/e can handle. Makes me think that maybe Pro/e would be the best tool to handle the job, use it in back up mode to create the assemblies with appropriate dependencies. What's missing in the deliberations, so far, is a way to find out what products we are dealing with. For example, product glbrzh at revs A, B, C; product hglbrz at revs A-F, product zhglbr at rev A. These are all end items at their particular revision level and perhaps, from a logistics perspective, must be maintained. Intralink 'As stored' can accomplish this kind of Revision baselining, assuming you've set your top level assemblies to Released. So, in the end, what you are looking for is released assemblies that have a blank 'where used' report (meaning they're an end item). Each end item, if the Intralink releasing process was performed correctly, should behave this way. When you have the list of each end item at each release level, you can export each with 'As Stored' set. This will effectively duplicate your ILINK database on a network drive. Don't know if Pro/BATCH can handle this; otherwise it would probably be a Java script, Intralink's interface programming language. Maybe that's exactly that's what you're for. But, I suspect that there's a built in, single button function, when properly set up, that can do what you want. While I can't tell you what that is, I think that's what you should be looking for in Intralink.
David Janes