Vault "Items" and iParts

[Anonymous]

An adjustable foot for a piece of furniture is purchased in two parts from the supplier:
"Foot A" comes with either a "Short Leg" or a "Long leg" (both of which are adjustable within a range).
Foot B, C, D etc - all come with the same leg options.

At the end of the day though, there are only ever 2 items to purchase: The foot and either the short leg or the long leg. This is achieved in Inventor as an iAssembly (Phantom BOM structure) plus 2 iParts (the foot and the leg).  This iAssembly works nicely as it's one thing to place and easily adjustable to get the right length.  Naturally there are lots of iPart Children for all the permutations.

How do you allocate Vault Item numbers such that (regardless of the assembly) you only ever get 2 Item numbers  in the BOM per foot-assembly?  (One for the foot, and one for the leg).  

You can't allocate an Item to an iPart Factory, and you can't allocate the same Item number to multiple iPart children. 

Any suggestions warmly welcomed.

[pcrawley]

OK - the username 'subscriptions' wasn't supposed to be a deliberate cover.  I'm posting again under my real name 🙂

To simplify:  An Inventor iPart generates several child files.

It is modelled this way for the sake of the Inventor users.

From an ordering/stock perspective, the child files generated by the iPart are all the same and therefore must to have the same Vault Item number.

How?

(Creating a Vault Item from one Child and attaching the other child files to it isn't the answer because new children are being created all the time.  Introduce contraception perhaps?!)

[scottmoyse]

With Item mapping set up so that the part number is used as the item number, then with replace with duplicate selected during item creation, the subsequent parts get added to the primary files/parts item. Then whenever any of those secondary files are referenced by an assembly and its item is created the item the secondary files are attached to (the primary one) is referenced.

Therefore if you have 14 variations and each one is used in an assembly, then the primary item will be called up, and the item will be called up another 13 times due to the secondary file links. The item will therefore state Quantity 14.

I could create a video if anyone else wants to know how its done.

But the question has now evolved to this:

Based on this thread

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Vault/Default-item-number-scheme/m-p/2905144/highlight/true#M...

So even if you set the item numbering to use sequential as default, but then have the part number mapped to the item number (so I can use mapping in some instances), it will always default to the mapped properties for the item number.

So the question is, how on earth do you get secondary files to attach to an existing item without some form of mapping which results in duplicate items being created? We need to have this mapped secondary file behaviour for library components and content center, but a standard sequential numbering setup for all of our day to day designed content.