Content Center vs public computers - moving projects difficult

[John_Nagle]

TechShop has an Autodesk-supported program under which computers at TechShop locations have Autodesk Inventor installed. The setup is that Inventor is installed in "Desktop" mode; there's no Vault or remote server.  However, all the machines are reloaded daily from a read-only disk image, which, among other things, restores Inventor to its freshly-installed state. Users generally carry projects arount on USB sticks.

This all works until you put Content Center parts into a project. Place from Content Center works fine.  Design accerators like the bolt designer work fine.  Until you move the project to another machine.  Then, attempting to open an assembly produces "not found" errors for most or all Content Center parts.

Each machine has a full copy of the Content Center parts in the Application Data directory, but when a project is opened, its Content Center parts are normally loaded from the user-level cache files. Those are emptied nightly when the machine is flushed back to the newly installed state, and a different machine is unlikely to have the same Content Center items in the cache anyway.

Something needs to be set up differently. But what?  How do people ship Inventor projects around?  Thanks.

[BrettCaldeira]

Hi Johan

What you have to understand about content centre is the following. The content center is actually just a database of parameters and values. When selecting bolted connections, or place from content center Inventor looks into the content center database (Found in your Application data folder), creates the part from the values you have selected in the database, and then saves the actual file (.ipt) it creates to your hard drive. The parts on your hard drive is what your assemblies are complaining about.

If you have a standard  project file, the default location of the content files it creates will be in My Documents\Inventor\Content Center Files\2012. Depending on the version of Inventor you are running it normally places the year in the content center folder. So what you need to include with you when moving around the office with projects is Content Center Files folder.

Here are a few possible solutions:

Autodesk Vault

Pack and Go

Shared Content Centre library location which Inventor points to

Point your content center location to your project file

Copy the content center files from My Documents and replace the Files on the next workstation My Documents.

Regards,

[rmckenna0315]

I think in your case moving the content center files to the project folder (which should be the thumb drive) would be an eloquent solution.

[blair]

Most cases you have the option to create a "Custom" part from CC. This will create the part and place it into your Work directory automatically

[John_Nagle · Accepted solution]

Pack and Go seems to be the approved solution here.  I'd been looking in Inventor Help and the Inventor menus and not finding anything useful. I had no idea that feature was installed as an add on to the Windows file manager.

Although, in a world where everything mobile is now expected to sync seamlessly with everything else, there should be a corresponding "Unpack and Sync" operation to "Pack and Go",