We rely heavily on i-part fucntionality, which alsoe means that parts require regular updates. In the current situation, this means having to manually check out all variations that were generated by the factory before being able to update them.
The current workaround suggested by our Autodesk retailer is to place all the generated components in a new file so everything can be updated in one go. This is feasible for a small part with few variations, but not for larger assemblies having many different i-parts and variations.
instead, why not simply check out all children at the same time as the factory? You know they will need to be updated when the factory is altered, so why can't this be done automatically?
Similarly; when opening a dwg of one of the generated files. Inventor can tell the dwg is out of date because it is referring to an out of date part generated by an older version of the factory. Why is it that inventor does prompt to have the user check out the dwg, but not automatically check out the part that should be updated?
These are such simple tasks of which the software knows it should be done, so just automate it!
And finally; we've often found that not all changes to the factory part will trigger inventor to actually consider the generated parts to be out of date. When i then try to use the generate files function, nothing happens. No new file is generated, regardless of being checked out or not. I would like to see inventor actually responding to a command i'm giving it. If i select generate files, it should generate the file. I should be able to see the time stamp of the file on disk change to the current time, and this does not happen in this case. It forces me to have to make a physical change to the factory )like changing a feature parameter) to trigger inventor and really require files to be re-generated.
To me all this sounds so very trivial, and it it would increase my feeling of reliability towards inventor and vault. Not getting the proper response from inventor makes me doubt the sofware and requires me to keep double checking everything. (Note that this issue was already submitted two years ago as a support case but apparently it wasn't serious enough...)
cheers,
Misha