I had given up on being able to effectively use Project Defaults in ProjectWise. We had taken advantage of the ability to get a couple of variables to represent the top folder of a project. This allowed us to use variables to assign project specific folders and settings and some of these work with the Project Defaults. But the one roadblock was getting the top part of the Project Defaults dialog box, which are "full path" filename definitions.
We had tried building a single variable that contained that value, and it refused to function. Well, this week, one of our support programmers discovered that if you use two variables - one for the folder information and a second for the filename and put them together into each field, BINGO!
So, we found we could put something like this into the XIN field: $(MDOT_INROADS_ROAD_XIN)\$(MDOT_INROADS_XIN_FILENAME) and it finally will load the desired XIN. We have a "standard" XIN, but allow users to copy these to each project so that as a team, they can customize preferences and other things as needed. And this should allow us to set up non-ProjectWise projects that can be used for testing and/or training and will also still load the appropriate files and default to the appropriate folders via one universal project defaults configuration.