Being Inventive

Update or Service Pack: not exactly the same thing

We have seen a couple of questions come up on the Inventor newsgroup around the new Update mechanism that the Inventor team has initiated and whether Updates replace Service packs going forward.
Let it be clear that Inventor will still have Service Packs going forward.
As its name implies, Updates are intended to deliver critical updates (formerly hotfixes) on a more predictable schedule. Think of it as a bundle of hotfixes.

Service Packs allow us to deliver more complex changes but require more time to produce and verify than Updates.
Like Hotfixes, Updates only affect targeted areas of the product associated with particular issues.

There are a couple of other differences between Service Packs and Updates.

Service packs can be included in deployment images, Updates can't.
Service Packs increment the build number, Updates don't.
After applying an update you will neither see a difference in the build number nor a change to the release name in the About dialog.

For example, if you apply Update1 to Inventor 2013, you will still see in the About dialog a build number 138 and a Release: 2013 RTM.
In order to verify if you have Update1 installed, you need to go to the Windows Control Panel and use Programs and Features and View installed updates.

Fig 1: Location of the View installed updates choice in Programs and Features

Update1 can be found under the Autodesk Inventor * 2013 section.

Fig 2: Location of Update1 under the Inventor 2013 product name

You will see periodic Updates in between Service Packs. Both Service Packs and Updates are now cumulative, meaning you only have to install the most recent Service Pack and Update to obtain all previously released hotfixes.

Please note that the Update mechanism is only for 2012, 2013 and future releases. It will not be used for the 2010 and 2011 releases.

Bob

What is the meaning of the “Keep legacy body status” command?

Some of you might have noticed a new context menu in the drawing environment of Inventor 2013.

When you open a pre-2013 Inventor drawing in release 2013, you will see following "Keep Legacy Body Status" menu when using the right mouse button on any drawing view.

Once you turn off this option on a view, you will never see the menu on that particular view again.

Turning off this option has to happen on a view-per-view basis. You cannot turn it off for all views in a single operation.
Why would you uncheck the command and what is this mysterious command exactly doing?

Fig 1: Keep Legacy Body Status command

The command is new for 2013 and it controls how legacy drawing views react to design views.

We introduced design views in parts in 2012. But in 2012, design views did not have the capability to change the visibility or the color of bodies in a part.

In 2012 when you created drawing views of multi-body parts, you could only influence the visibility of the bodies in the drawing by using the "Visibility" context menu.

 

 Fig 2: Controlling body visibility in Inventor 2012 drawing

Since 2013, the visibility and color of bodies is stored in design views and by consequence in a drawing view you can now also manage body visibility by applying a design view representation.

So when you see the "Keep legacy body status" context menu checked, you are using the 2012 way of controlling visibility of bodies.

Once you uncheck the "Keep legacy body status" checkmark, you will be using the 2013 way of controlling visibility.

And there is no way in going back. Once you uncheck the checkmark, that context menu will disappear on that particular view forever.

   

Let me illustrate this with a small example.

When you create a drawing view of a part with 2 visible solid bodies in 2012, you will see something similar to this.

 

Fig 3: 2012 drawing view of part with two bodies

Now save the drawing in 2012 and open the drawing in 2013.

You will see the "Keep legacy body status" context menu checked on the view.

 

 Fig4: New context menu in 2013

Open the part and add a design view representation that turns off the visibility of one of the bodies.

Call this view representation View1.

Fig5: Visibility of Solid2 turned off

Return to the drawing and try to apply the view representation View1 to your drawing view.

Fig6: Applying a view representation to the drawing view

You will see that applying the view representation has no effect and body Solid2 continues to be visible in the drawing because the 2012 method is still in effect (and we had not turned off explicitly the visibility of that body in 2012).

Now turn off the "Keep legacy body status" on the view. You will get below warning message which is OK because that is exactly what we want to do.

Fig 7: Switching from the old way to the new way of controlling bodies

The message indicates that the body visibility in the view is now allowed to change when the view gets associated with a Design View Representation.

Here is the result: the visibility of the second body is controlled by the view representation.

Fig 8: Visibility of one of the bodies turned off via the representation associated to the view

This command remains undocumented in the Inventor Help wiki, so consider yourself lucky that you have read my little article J

 Bob

Frame Miter Cuts in BOM and Parts List

You have applied some Miter cuts, with the command Miter from the menu Design > Frame, to the Frames of your assembly inserted with Frame Generator.

Now you want to display the angle info of these end treatments in the assembly BOM and Parts List.

When you apply the Miter cuts to the Frames, Inventor creates for each frame, some custom properties named CUTDETAIL1, CUTDETAIL2, etc.

So, in order to display them in the BOM, you need to add these Custom iProperty Columns from the BOM dialog.

In case you need to display these columns in almost all your assembly BOMs, you can include them, by default, in the BOM of your assembly template.
In order to do that, you open a new assembly selecting your standard template and, after having added the two columns, you save the assembly as template with the command Save As >  Save Copy As Template.

 

In order to display the two columns in the Parts List of the assembly drawing, edit the Parts List after inserting it and add the custom property columns.

Even in this case, if this is a common workflow for you, in the Style Editor you can define a new style for the Parts List that displays the custom columns by default.

Caveat. If you delete the Miter cut of a frame associated to the custom property CUTDETAIL1 and recreate it, the name of the property will be CUTDETAIL3 and the value will not display in the corresponding cell of the CUTDETAIL1 column.

Ale

 

Inventor 2013 Update1

Inventor 2013 Update1 has been released.

This is a first in a series of updates that will be made available before we produce a service pack.

The frequency of the updates will be higher than the frequency of service packs.

This particular Update1 is a must have for users that have problems with Material and Color migration amongst other things.

The full list of changes can be found here..

Bob

Checkout Dialog in Inventor missing and Message from Inventor that File is in Read-Only

Issue: You are working on an assembly (checked-out) in Inventor and some sub-components are checked in.You try to edit one of the components. You usually should get the checkout dialog from Vault but instead you just get this Inventor dialog that the file is read-only:

Verify in the Inventor Vault Ribbon - File Status - Options and open the "Prompts..." dialog:

You see that on File Edit - "File '{0} is not checked out. Do you want to check it out now?' the Response is the to "No" and the Frequency is set to "Never Prompt"

Solution: Change the answer here to "Yes" or "Yes/all" and/or set the Frequency to "Always Prompt"

Background: you once chose on this dialog in Inventor:
...the Answer "No" and "Don´t everprompt again"

via crackingthevault.typepad.com

Inventor 2013 stress analysis file bloat

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Update: the file bloat issue not only affects the Stress Analysis add-in but also affects users that use the Inventor Optimization add-in.
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To anyone using the stress analysis module in Inventor Professional 2013, I wanted to inform you that we just found out that the file size will increase substantially because instead of storing the stress results in separate files, due to a defect, Inventor stores the stress results inside the ipt file.
You can run into this situation if the FEAFileHandler.exe program is not registered correctly on your machine.

We are working on a hotfix for this issue but in the meantime to avoid future file bloat, you will have to manually register the FEAFileHandler.exe program.

When you have installed Inventor2013 to the default location, run following command from a command window:

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2013\Bin\FEAFilesHandler.exe" /regserver

Change the string "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2013" if you have installed Inventor in a different location.

Above operation only prevents the problem from happening again so if you also want to reduce the file size of files that have been affected by this, you can take these additional steps:

1. Delete the FEA simulation data folders for the affected files.
   These are subfolders in the location where your FEA parts are stored and they have the same name as the FEA parts.

   Example: if your part is stored as c:\workspace\test.ipt , the FEA (.fres) and mesh (.fmsh) files will reside in c:\workspace\test\AIP\FEA

2. If you have FEA files in your %temp% folder from a previous solve, delete them.
3. Open Inventor and for each existing 'bloated' model file with a simulation, do the following:
   1. Open the file and skip the request to find the missing linked files.
   2. Use the 'Tools > Links' command and delete the OLE links for all stress analysis files ( .fins, .fsat, .ftes, .fwiz, .fmsh, .fres).
   3. Save the file.
   4. Enter the Stress Analysis environment and re-run the simulation – this should take some time to recreate all of the results.
   5. Save the file again.
   6. Check the 'Tools > Links' command again – the 'link size' should now be much smaller

Cheers

Bob

Vault Check In Error and Content Center Language

You are working with a Vault project and while checking in an assembly with its components you get the Check In Error below related to some Content Center standard parts.

In general, this error that prevents you from checking in the assembly is due to two contributory causes

The first one is the Vault setting “Enforce Unique File Names”.

This is a very common setting for most of the Companies using Vault.

 

The second cause is when the Inventor users, sharing the common Vault project, use Inventor in different languages.

In general, when this is the case, the users don't change the Content Center Language, that is the same of the product they are using by default.

By the way, when users that share the same project use Inventor in different languages, it is recommended they configure the Content Center to use the same language.

If they don’t do that, you can read below the details of a possible scenario that can lead to the Check In error.

 

A Content Center standard part resides in Vault because it has been inserted and checked in by an user, using the English language for the Content Center.

Another user inserts in another assembly the same standard part from the Content Center.

If this second user uses the same language for the Content Center, the standard part will be retrieved from Vault.

So, there is no problem checking in the assembly, because the standard part will not be listed in the files to be checked in.

Instead, if the second user is using a different language for the Content Center (i.e.: German), the standard part file will be created under the subfolder related to the Content Center Language (i.e.: C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\Inventor\Content Center Files\R2013\de-DE\DIN 404(1)) and it will not be retrieved from Vault, because the folder structure is different.

So, when you check in the assembly, Inventor will try to check in also this standard part and you will get the Check In Error because actually a file with the same name is already in the Vault.

 

By the way, if this is your case and you are stuck because you cannot check in your assembly you can follow the steps below for solving the problem.

• In Vault Explorer check the Content Center language the other users are using for inserting the standard parts in the assemblies (i.e.: en-US = English).

• In Inventor (without closing the assembly you cannot check in), menu Manage > Content Center > Editor.

• In the Content Center Editor, menu Tools > Language Setting and set the language as the other users > Done.

• Menu Manage > Content Center > Refresh Standard Components.

• All the standard parts inserted with a different Content Center Language will be listed and refreshed.

• After that, save and check in the assembly.

No error message will appear this time.

Ale

Factory Design User Assets Sharing

You have published your models as Factory Assets for using them with the Factory functionalities you have in Inventor and AutoCAD installed from the Factory Design Suite.

In case, you can find here the details for authoring and publishing the Factory Assets.

You have published them as Local User Assets

So, they are available just for the user that has published them.

If you want to make them available for another user of the same machine or on another machine, you need to copy the content of the folder C:\Users\<user1>\Documents\Factory Library and paste them under the folder C:\Users\<user2>\Documents\Factory Library.

Where user1 is the user that has published the assets as described above and user2 is the user that needs to use these assets as well.

 

By the way, if you want to use these Assets across users and machines, the recommended procedure for publishing them is to define a library path in the Inventor project.

The library folder can be defined, of course, in a shared location on a shared server.

You can find more details in this page under Procedures > Factory asset publishing > Follow this procedure to publish factory assets > Use project libraries for published factory assets.

After doing that, you get the Library folder in the Publish Asset dialog and you can publish the Assets in this folder or in the subfolders you may create.

The Assets published in the Library folder and subfolder will be available for all the users using projects that include the library path you have defined above.

In case you have published the corresponding 2D Assets as well in the Library folder or subfolder and you want to use them as well across users and machines with the Factory functionalities in AutoCAD, you need to add the Inventor project that contains the path to the Library folder in the field “Inventor Project used to define additional libraries”, in the AutoCAD options, Factory Assets tab, Libraries section.

 

Now, let’s assume you have already published a certain amount of Assets in the User Assets folder and subfolders as explained at the beginning of this post, so they are available just for the user who has used done that.

Then you decide you want to share them across users and machines.

In order to do that with the Assets you have already published in the User Assets folder and subfolders, you define a library path in the project as explained above, copy the content of the User Assets folder (i.e.: C:\Users\<user1>\Documents\Factory Library) and paste them under the folder defined in the Library path of the project.

After doing that, the Assets will be available for all the users using the same project and also for the user using different projects but that contain the path to the Library folder.

Then, from this moment in on, you will start publishing the new Assets in the Library folder and subfolders.

Ale