iParts, iAssemblies and Vault. Major issues

[waynehelley]

Hi there,

I have been using iparts/iassemblies with Vault and I am having major issues due to messages reading "Problem saving...". I am aware this is because member files are out of date, Inventor is attempting to regeneate them, but Vault is causing the files to be Read-Only.

I am using Inventor/Vault 2011 and am aware that since 2011, the integration between Vault and iparts/iassemblies have been improved but has the problem been fixed?

I am working as part of a team on a major reconstruction of company data (5 of us have been working for 6 months). Nearly everything we have modelled has been in iparts and iassemblies as the company is hoping to have a top level assembly that will be nice and easy to swap and change sub-assemblies based on customer requirements (it's quite complex as there are iparts within iassemblies within iassemblies within iassemblies within...)

In reality changing members from the top level will be very difficult since, absolutely ANY change to any of the ipart/iassembly factories will mean that the member files are out of date. Inventor will be aware of this and will attempt to regenerate the file, overwriting the out of date member. This will not work as the member is set to read-only by Vault and this will grind everything to a stop.

The only way to get things to run smoothly would be to keep all member files up to date but in reality this will not happen as some of the tables are huge (I have an iassembly factory with 500 members which takes a day to regenerate all member files) so people are bound to be lazy and not regenerate the members upon making minor edits.

It is possible to check out absolutely everything from Vault to enable it to be possible to edit the top level assembly but this will cause problems if multiple users need the same files.

If I could go to the start of the project, I would push to not use iparts/iassemblies at all. Instead I would model everything then look into creating an iLogic interface to create assemblies from the top level.

Does anyone have any advice??

Thanks,

Wayne

[Cadmanto]

Wayne,

In all honesty, if you know the newer versions have improved (I am running 2012) what is stopping you from upgrading?

Not saying that we haven't had our share of issues, in 2012, but a lot of them came from ignorance.  Once learned it has been going pretty smoothly.

Also, you might want to consider posting this thread in the vault section of the forum.

[waynehelley]

We have been told by management that upgrading isn't an option right now. If I knew for sure that upgrading would definitely solve the problem, we might have a case.

From the research I have done today, these problems still seem to be happening in 2012 and 2013.  I found this article which was useful but still doesn't solve the problem that Inventor considers all member files to be out of date if ANY change has been made to the factory...

http://www.augi.com/library/navigating-the-library-assembly-minefield

Thanks,