Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

I have created some "programs" to automate drawing creation of some of our most common products. The problem I hav eis with my assembly drawing. When parts are suppressed and unsuppressed, they don't seem to behave the same way that features do. When you dimension a part feature in an idw and suppress that feature, if a week later you unsuppress that feature the dimenensions come back.  Parts don't seem to follow this behaviour. If you dimension a part, suppress it, open and save the drawing, then later unsuppress it and open the drawing back up the dimesnions do not come back.  Why is this? Is there anyway for me to get these dimensions to "stick"?

Thanks,

Mike

[#2]

Hi Mike,

this is as designed. LOD is meant to be capacity saving tool and the suppress changes are viewed more permanent then dessign views. To control visibility of components in drawing view I recommend to use design views.

Thanks

Ladislav

[#3]

Just to clarify, the term Inventor uses now (in English) is View Representations.  Design views is an older term (that makes those of us who understand it feel old!).

[#4]

My understanding is that if I use view representations to change visibility of parts, they will still show on my parts list as if they were normal active parts.  I need them to come and go in the parts list as well as in the drawing view.

[#5]

You are correct, they will still show in the parts list.  Have you looked into iAssemblies?  I haven't used them, but I believe that they could be useful in this application.

[#6]

My assemblies are way too complicated (stuff changing) for iAssemblies. I tried it once and gave up when I broke 3k rows. The one I'm having problems with now uses over 1300 lines of iLogic code in the main assembly plus around 100 lines in each of about 40 components. I have one assembly with over 5k lines of code in just the top level assembly. 

Am I really the only person that uses component suppression for something other than simplifying large assemblies?

[#7]

OK, how about using Visibility combined with BOM attribute?  Since you're doing it with iLogic, turn the unwanted parts to Reference and invisible.  Then they are in neither the view nor the parts list.

[#8]

Most people who try to use LOD (or suppression) run into some problem that prevents them from using it for anything other than memory managment.

The most annoying problem that I have seen is the inability to save files when you have the iam at one LOD and the ipn or idw with another LOD all open at the same time.  IV gets confused when trying to save and you have to close all but one of the documents before you can save the remaining document.

In your case, why not filter the parts list by assembly design rep?  This might be too complex if you have lots of configurations to track.

[#9]

I know all about the save problem swalton, it makes my eye twitch at least a couple times a day.

If I use visibility and BOM structure then I have the opposite problem with my dimensions. They show up regardless of wether the part is there or not.

Swalton, are you suggesting I make a View Rep for every possible configuration?

[#10]

3k design views may be a bit much, but you might be able to use ilogic to move components to and from a "display" design view.  Then set your parts list to filter the "display" design view.

Is there some ilogic you can run in the idw to hide/delete dims based on the components that they reference?  If that doesn't work, I think you might be better off setting some sort of iprop flag in the components and using that as your filter reference in the idw parts list.