Drawing symbol library stored centrally

[pierre.masson]

Currently the drawing symbols are stored in each individual drawings.

If you company uses thousands of symbols this is not ideal.

We would like it to be stored in a central library, which we can organize. You should be able to see a preview of the symbol when browsing the library directly from Inventor.

[jtylerbc]

I would love this.  When we add symbols to our template, it's always a pain stumbling across older drawings that didn't have it, and having to copy them over.

I would prefer that this be an additional storage location, rather than completely replacing the local copy in the drawing files.  Occasionally, we have need to modify an existing symbol in a particular drawing, and I would like to keep those variations local.  I see it as being analogous to the Styles & Standards setup of local vs. library styles.

[jletcher]

Best thing to do is use ilogic with external excel file so it can be updated and changed...

 This way there is none stored in the file and older drawings is easy too... I have one rule that run in the IDW and on rule the is external that I can get to and add...

  Works great give it a try..

[cnguyen]

I would love to use iLogic. Could you please share the rules? Thank you.

[djreesing]

This would be great! Another advantage would be the filesize of the drawings. We now have a lot of symbols in our templates and these symbols are not needed for every drawing. If there is a central database of sketched symbols then you can add only the symbols you need to the current drawing.

[gary.belisle]

Another way to handle this is to write an API add-in for Inventor. I have set up symbols all contained within one centralized symbols drawing file (or multiple depending on how you write the code) then when you run the add-in it pops up a list off all the symbols available. I currently have this working and it saves a lot of disk space since the drawing template does not contain any symbols.

I'm surprised Autodesk doesn't do something like this. All that would be requied is an Application Option setting pointing to the centralized drawing file or folder similar to the iFeature Catalog.

[djreesing]

Great idea Gary, care to share some code snippets? I could write this from scratch myself, but some examples would speed-up the process.

[gary.belisle]

Sample Code

[dan_szymanski]

Accepted idea [US21875]. Thanks!

[norbertjotterand]

Good idea,

We are using a drawing where we are storing all of our symbols (template drawing), in VBA we have a function that is going to read all the names of symbols in the file and, through a list box, we can select which symbol we want to import on our drawing. We have also a macro which replace automatically a symbol by a new one (selection by symbol name).

[alessandro.gasso]

Function for providing access to a symbol library that can be organized and provide a preview of the symbol prior to insertion.

[c_stulz1]

Yes, its realy a good Idea. I was wating long for it.

[dan_szymanski]

This idea has been implemented within Autodesk Inventor 2016. Special thanks to the author of this Idea and likewise to everyone who cast your Kudo for it.  You can now access and share collections of sketch symbols through a external Sketch Symbol Library (idw or dwg).  Symbols can be saved to, and or placed from, a designated library.  When placing symbols, a search tool may provide assistance in locating a symbol and likewise a preview is generated prior to placement.

[DRoam]

@dan_szymanski, this sounds identical to this idea (implemented): Drawing symbol library stored centrally