I am assigning an Item to an Inventor assembly in Vault Pro 2015, SP1. The associated idw comes along for the ride as expected, but by default is only an attachment. Is there a setting that would make the idw also a primary link? I would like the Item revision properties to go to both the iam and idw. I can remove the idw and make it a primary link manually, but I'd like to have that the default.
Chris Benner
Inventor Tube & Pipe, Vault Professional
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Here are a couple of videos showing what I'm doing.
In the first video, I assign an Item to a drawing, nothing else is linked or attached. So I assign an Item to the assembly, and the drawing is attached,... but not linked. The components are available in the BOM tab to be turned on or off. I can change revision on the Item, and set my revision properties. When I go to the drawing in Inventor, however, and check it out... update properties does not change the revision table or titleblock, because the drawing (as an attachment to the Item) does not pick up any of the property changes. In the secodn video (I hit stop recording before I meant to... oops!) I change the drawing on the Item to a link, return to the drawing and update properties, and everything updates as expected.
The question is,... is it my workflow that is flawed? Right now I do not assign items to assemblies, only the drawings themselves. We want to be able to do it the way I am showing, so that both the assembly (or part) and it's associated drawing get revised and updated at the same time. In this way, I can show component revisions in the parts list of the assembly drawings, so the builder always knows to check his parts for the correct revision.
Any thoughts on this? I'm just playing now, but any suggestions are welcome.
Chris Benner
Inventor Tube & Pipe, Vault Professional
Cad Tips Tricks & Workarounds | Twitter | LinkedIn
Autodesk University Classes:
Going With The Flow with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Increasing The Volume with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Power of the Autodesk Community | Getting to Know You | Inventor Styles & Standards |Managing Properties with Vault Professional | Vault Configuration | Vault - What is it & Why Do I Need It? | A Little Less Talk - Tube & Pipe Demo | Change Orders & Revisions - Vault, Inventor & AutoCAD | Authoring & Publishing Custom Content
Seems like a bug to me. I've never been a big fan of the rev block funcionality.
It looks like the item assignment functionality acts the same as it was at least as far back as 2013 with respect to linking of a design document to an item. If you highlight both the design file (IPT and IAM) and the design document file (IDW or inventor DWG) vault will assign an item to both (which is not what you want).
How does it act if you only highlight the IAM and assign the item?
Also, its interesting that you are at a company named Powell. I am as well.
If I only highlight the .iam, I get that as a Primary Link, and the .idw as an attachment only. To do what I would like to do the .idw needs to be a link so it picks up the changed properties.
Chris Benner
Inventor Tube & Pipe, Vault Professional
Cad Tips Tricks & Workarounds | Twitter | LinkedIn
Autodesk University Classes:
Going With The Flow with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Increasing The Volume with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Power of the Autodesk Community | Getting to Know You | Inventor Styles & Standards |Managing Properties with Vault Professional | Vault Configuration | Vault - What is it & Why Do I Need It? | A Little Less Talk - Tube & Pipe Demo | Change Orders & Revisions - Vault, Inventor & AutoCAD | Authoring & Publishing Custom Content
I don't believe that there is a way to control the file-item relationship behavior, and I have researched it pretty extensively for 2013, so I don't know how applicable that is for 2015.
If the standard way of assigning items doesn't create relationships that allow the rev block functionality to work correctly, I would consider that a bug.
I agree with tmoney, never been a fan of integrated vault-inventor revision block
Question... could you write the item revision property information to the assembly and use that to populate the drawing iProperties? which in turns populates the revision block?
We use Vault Change Orders to document our revisions. Within the Inventor drawing revision block we manually enter the CO# and very short summary of the changes. The idea is if you want more details you need to see the Vault ECO.
Mike
This is actually what we do with revisions as well.
We have a portion of the title block that contains the latest rev number, revising engineering and a short revision description. The difference for us is that our ECO's are in Agile PLM.
You can only see on revision at a time, but between the file history and the ECO's, you should be able to see the progression nicely. There is also a functionality (that I think is in the enterprise tool pack) that will alow version comparison in 2d and 3d.
I know you might be restricted by your ISO procedures... but we got around that by not requiring a revision history on the drawing when we wrong our procedures. 😉
This is not the "Vault" revision table... that only works with revisions performed on files, not Items. They never came up with any method for documenting revisions done on Items. So I came up with my own revision table using custom iproperties linked to the Item properties in Vault. This has worked well so far since I am only making Items of the drawing files. But in looking into more of the BOM functionality it would just be nice if I didn't have to (yet again) reinvent the freaking wheel where my revisions are concerned, just to get around one more obstacle.
Thanks for your thoughts Mike, they give me a couple of ideas that might work. If I get time to play with this, I'll report back.
Chris Benner
Inventor Tube & Pipe, Vault Professional
Cad Tips Tricks & Workarounds | Twitter | LinkedIn
Autodesk University Classes:
Going With The Flow with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Increasing The Volume with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Power of the Autodesk Community | Getting to Know You | Inventor Styles & Standards |Managing Properties with Vault Professional | Vault Configuration | Vault - What is it & Why Do I Need It? | A Little Less Talk - Tube & Pipe Demo | Change Orders & Revisions - Vault, Inventor & AutoCAD | Authoring & Publishing Custom Content
If they are properties mapped from the item to the files themselves and you were previously only assigning items to the drawings, it makes sense.
Files which are linked as tertiary (i.e. the default for drawings of assemblies) don't get properties mapped. It isn't very convenient, but if the you mapped your revision description to an iproperty on the iam or ipt, then mapped your title block to that rather than the property on the idw, it would probably update correctly with the standard file relationships.
It might be a hassle, but if you are planning on leveraging the BOM capabilities of the Item master, I would stick as close to standard suggested practice as possible.
In Vault Professional 2015 R2, it is possible to write item properties back to Tertiary links, i.e. associated drawings, as long as the drawing is linked to only one item and there are write mappings between item properties and file properties.
Thanks
Anil,
That function was broken. There is a case logged, and the last I heard... a hotfix on the way for it. #10070545 Mr. Ron Smith.
Chris Benner
Inventor Tube & Pipe, Vault Professional
Cad Tips Tricks & Workarounds | Twitter | LinkedIn
Autodesk University Classes:
Going With The Flow with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Increasing The Volume with Inventor Tube and Pipe | Power of the Autodesk Community | Getting to Know You | Inventor Styles & Standards |Managing Properties with Vault Professional | Vault Configuration | Vault - What is it & Why Do I Need It? | A Little Less Talk - Tube & Pipe Demo | Change Orders & Revisions - Vault, Inventor & AutoCAD | Authoring & Publishing Custom Content