Feature tree of custom iPart members?

[cadsupport]

Hi there, is it somehow possible (maybe through API) to access the underlying features of a custom iPart member? In our case it would help to automate the NC process. This would enable us to blank edges of certain iFeatures that are not necessary for NC cutting operations within a pre-processor. Best regards Erik Gilsdorf

[philippe.leefsma]

Hi

an iPart member is like a derived part: it doesn't contain features directly but references the geometry created in the iPart factory. You would need to modify the factory if you want to see changes impacted in its members. I'm not sure what you mean by "blank" edges...

Regards,

Philippe.

[cadsupport]

Hello Philippe, what I want in the end is to hide some for example certain holes or punches in an Inventor drawing or give their edges a different colour. I can do that manually by right-clicking these holes in the drawing and say "hide". Now I need to include this in a automated process, including NC programming. The idea is to have a preprocessor that will hide contour edges of certain features in the IDW/Inventor DWG before it is processed by our NC tool. I guess that can be accomplished for normal sheetmetal parts by parsing the Features/iFeatures of the displayed model and selecting their edges. But I can not imagine how to do this for a custom iPart, as the features are not visible in the tree anymore. Best regards Erik

[philippe.leefsma]

So you can either hide the curves in the drawing, as you do from the UI, or as I mentioned if you want to suppress features at the iPart level, you need to operate on the iPart factory.

You can retrieve all drawing curves representing a model entity using DrawingView.DrawingCurves( [ModelObject] As Variant ), but in case of a derived part or iPart member, I'm not sure passing the factory feature will return the curves of the drawing representing the member, you can give a try.

I hope it helps,

Philippe.