Has anyone succesfully created an external (say VB .NET) application that Starts Inventor (2013 in my case), loads up an Inventor assembly (with ETO content) then controls the Parameters and demands the value for rules.
Starting Inventor and opening the ETO content assembly is no problem, but how to get at the Intent root so I can fiddle with the parameters/rules.... there I fall flat.
Has anyone achieved this? If so what is the trick?
I am only familiar with this on the autocad side but with autocad you can only access the intent api from a plugin, I think the only exception is if you want to translate Intent code from V2 to V3, I was able to use that part of DFK.dll (DFKWrapper.TranslateFile) in a standalone exe only because that's also used in their translate command line utility which is running outside of autocad and it has no knowledge of models etc.
Thanks for the reply. I have external (VB .NET) executables controling a couple of different ETO(AutoCAD) app's and they works quite well. I need to do something similar against a new InventorETO app and that's where I am running into the problem.
Yes I have done this successfully. As sszabo mentioned you can do this only by talking to an inventor addin. The code that connects tto intent must live in the same process as intent which is achieved via an inventor addin. You have a few choices on how you want your external application to talk to your addin and there should be plenty of resources for that on the inventor customization forum. I personally found WCF to work quite well. Perhaps the easiest option is to have your inventor addin scanning a directory watching for an XML file that you're expecting your external application to write when it makes a request.
Thanks for the information. Clearly the important thing here is that an AddIn must be involved. With that in mind, I now have a direction to go in