ETO application to use both Inventor and AutoCAD?

[matthias.rolf]

Hello there!

First off: The final goal of this is to build a web application. 

I am trying to find a nice solution to the following problem:

I have an Inventor Intent assembly, consisting of several sub-assemblies, also ruled by Intent. In all of these sub-assembly and my top-level assembly, the placement of the objects is pretty much entirely done through constraints. This works pretty well so far and I think there won't be a problem getting this inside a web application using ETO Server. But:

I need to create AutoCAD drawings for the resulting assembly. Since our customer has "specialised" AutoCAD blocks for each of the parts used in these assemblies that contain exactly the information he needs, the next desired step would be to create an AutoCAD drawing based on the above Inventor Intent assembly that basically replaces each occurence of a part with the corresponding predefined block. Directly deriving a drawing from the Inventor assembly is not an option, because the resulting drawing doesn't contain the desired information.

Basically, I want to avoid having to rebuild the entire hierarchy in Intent for AutoCAD, especially since I won't have the convenience of constraints handling all placement there.

So, I guess my questions are the following:

1. From Intent in Inventor, is it possible to directly create an AutoCAD drawing, also ruled by Intent?

2. Would the AutoCAD Intent instance be able to access the Inventor assembly somehow and read out the part occurences and their position in order to place the corresponding blocks in the drawing?

If this is not possible, what would you suggest?

Some alternatives I have thought about:

a) I probably could write a DLL that reads out the part occurences in an assembly and their current position through the Inventor API, write that into some file and start AutoCAD with an Intent drawing that uses that file to build the drawing. Would that work for a web application, though?

b) Similar to a), but the AutoCAD part would not be done through Intent designs, but by using the AutoCAD API to create the drawings based on the info found in that file. Possible? Desirable for a web application?

[sanjay.ramaswamy]

Hi Matthias,

We are no longer officially supporting the ETO (Intent) - AutoCAD integration, so I would suggest not using that approach.

As far as creating AutoCAD DWG files, this is possible in desktop Inventor ETO by creating Inventor drawings and doing a 'Save As' to AutoCAD DWG. Anything beyond that will require you to use AutoCAD APIs in a different module.

Furthermore, the conversion of Inventor drawings to AutoCAD DWG is not currently supported on Inventor ETO Server. We'll provide this support in a future release.

Sanjay-

[matthias.rolf]

Hello Sanjay!

Thanks for your reply. For some reason I didn't receive a notification e-mail that someone responded, so please excuse my late answer.

The approach we're currently going with and which works well so far is this:

1. The Inventor assembly is completely created by Intent.

2.A .NET Inventor plugin traverses the Intent model hierarchy, looking for parts that have a rule with a specific name containing the ACAD block associated with it. It then looks for the matching component occurence to get the position the part has in the final assembly with all constraints solved. These two things combined together are then used to create an ACAD drawing by starting a new ACAD instance and using the ACAD API to create a corresponding drawing and to save that drawing to a given destination.

Do you see any big problem with this approach, especially when I move this to an ETO server controlled by a web application?

Thanks for your time.