Adding new factory members to legacy iPart

[andrew_buc]

We use Inventor 2012 and will most likely upgrade to 2013 between Christmas and New Year's, when our company traditionally shuts down for a week. I recently had occasion to edit an iPart for a hex head machine screw, originally modeled some years ago by someone who's no longer with the company, to add some sizes. As you'll see, the member names are Hex Head Machine Screws-001.ipt, Hex Head Machine Screws-002.ipt, etc. Why does the table go from Hex Head Machine Screws-002 to Hex Head Machine Screws-290, you ask? I'll get to that in a minute.

This iPart was modeled several Inventor versions ago, when the operator had no control over the iPart factory member names. When Inventor did start offering this control, I jumped right on it. In any iParts I modeled from there on out, I used the capabilities of MS-Excel to create abbreviated part descriptions for the iPart factory member names.

Last week I needed to go into this part and add some sizes. If I added the new sizes in sequence by thread size and screw length, they were going to slot in between the existing  Hex Head Machine Screws-002 and Hex Head Machine Screws-003. The next unused number was 290, so I made the new factory members Hex Head Machine Screws-290 thru -296, as per the attached screen grab. Naturally the suffixes on the factory member names are out of sequence, and it isn’t very elegant.

As I see it, the other alternatives would have been:

1)      Put the new sizes at the end of the list (worse, IMO).

2)      Put the new sizes in sequence and renumber the factory members so they were sequential down the line. If I’d done this, then every factory member (say, Hex Head Machine Screws-011) after the newly added ones would have stood for a different size HHMS than it did before, which would have been really bad.

3)      Rework the table so the existing names with numerical suffixes went away and were replaced by mnemonic names, as on my more recently modeled iParts. This would have resulted in assemblies looking for factory members under names that no longer existed, but it would have been possible to substitute the screws under their new names. I should mention that we are using the Vault, which makes matters easier.

I would have liked to take approach (3), but I was under some time pressure to finish an assembly using these fasteners, so I used the quick and dirty approach described above.

If you were sitting at my terminal, how would you have handled this?

[bobvdd · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew,

Personally I would not touch the filenames. Just to be absolutely sure that you don't end up with the wrong parts in existing assemblies 🙂

What I would do is the following.

After inserting the extra rows, I would make sure that there is one column that shows the right sequence and where the size designation actually matches the sizes in increasing order. You could even create a brand new column "Size designation" and fill in the sizes without any restrictions to what has happened in the past to this iPart.

In the example below I use the existing Part number column to accomplish this and here would be my steps.

• Add the extra rows
• Rename all part numbers so that the part number strings reflect the increasing size
• Make the Part number column a Key column (key 1 is fine if this is the only key you have in your table)
• Shift select all members in the browser and do a "Generate files" to refresh the member files on disk.
• To get a nicely sorted display in the Inventor browser, use the context menu on the table and switch from "List by member name" to "List by keys". 

Here is a summary picture on how it will look like:

Bob

[andrew_buc]

Thank you--this looks like a possibility. I'm pretty slammed at the moment and don't have time to look into it, but I'm definitely making a note of it.

[andrew_buc]

I just dug into the iPart factory a bit more. In this case, we already had suitable keys that showed up in the browser. So I moved the new rows to the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet, although I didn't want to do this orginally. I was a bit sorry not to have all screws of the same thread and different lengths in a contiguous group of rows in the spreadsheet, but we knew that an elegant solution wasn't going to happen.

In this case I don't feel the need for a new "Size designation" column, but I'll keep the suggestion in mind. Thans again.

[bobvdd]

You're welcome. Glad it worked out for you with the compromise of giving up the contiguity.

Bob