Being Inventive

Assembly document differences between FDS and PrDS

Note1: for a good understanding of this article, FDS stands for Factory Design Suite and PrDS stands for Product Design Suite.

Note2: to reproduce what is said in the article you will have to set your default File Open option for viewreps in the Application Options as follows:

The behavior that I will describe here has been bothering me for a couple of days before realizing what was going on.

So I wanted to highlight this to everyone to avoid unnecessary blank stares at the Inventor product J

Recently, while working in Inventor 2012 and also with the Inventor 2013 beta, I was confronted by surprise by the following dialog upon save of an assembly:

I had not seen this dialog before during save in a fresh new assembly after changing the color of one of the components.

The reason of course is that the Master viewrep is active and this viewrep is read-only (as is indicated by the lock symbol in the browser).

The cure is simple enough, like the dialog explains, to create a new view presentation to preserve the color changes before saving the assembly.

But I did not recall having seen the dialog in such a straightforward workflow. Here is what is going on:

There is a difference between the way FDS and PrDS create a new assembly document.

New assembly in FDS	New assembly in PrDS

 

In FDS 2012, the default viewrep is set to "Default" and thus is writeable. This behavior is independent from the viewrep option as set in the File Open options.

In PrDS 2012, the default viewrep in a new assembly is set to "Master" (and thus is locked) if "Master" is set in the FIle open options. This means that the PrDS File New behavior does depend on the File Open options which is unexpected and probably unwanted.

If you switch regularly between the two products, the difference in behavior between FDS and PrDS might confuse you.

But even for FDS users that stick to a single product but who temporarily want to simplify the ribbons by disabling the Factory add-ins, will at that point fall back to the PrDS behavior with the annoying dialog at save.

So don't tell me that I did not warn you J

Bob

Factory Design Suite 2012 Service Pack 1

SP1 for Factory Design Suite 2012 is now available here.

In the Readme file you can read that the service pack includes Autodesk Factory Design Utilities for Inventor 2012 SP1 and Autodesk Factory Design Utilities for AutoCAD 2012 SP1. Although SP1 for Inventor 2012 is not yet available, you can go ahead and install  Factory Design Suite 2012 SP1 anyway.
The anticipated Inventor and AutoCAD service packs can be installed once they are made available without invalidating the Factory service pack install.

We thought this needed clarification.

Cheers.

Bob