topic Re: Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127) in Inventor Forum

Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127)

moua.thao — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 16:36:23 GMT

Hi everyone,

I was curious if there was a way to increase the iproperties description character limit of 127. In some searches I found, users mentioned either using the comments section instead or using ilogic to do so. Another suggestion was third party software (I'd wish to avoid if possible).

Thanks much for any feedback.

Re: Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127)

Cadmanto — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:09:22 GMT

Why don't we start with you giving us some feedback on why you need 127 characters in a description?

I have 3 lines in my title block that give me a total of 81 characters. On a normal day, I will be lucky to use half of those.

Windows 10 x64 -16GB Ram
Intel i7-6700 @ 3.41ghz
nVidia GTS 250 - 1 GB
Inventor Pro 2018

Re: Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127)

mcgyvr — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:45:35 GMT

The limit is likely fixed..

As you hinted at you could use multiple fields (custom iprops or any other unused fields) setup to essentially be your "Description Part 1" and Description Part 2" or whatever as needed..

You could have some automation (ilogic) to prompt you to fill them out or concatenate from other fields or whatever you need.

But increasing a single field limit is unlikely to be possible..

I agree that needing more is a weird request.. My ERP system doesn't accept anywhere near that many characters for a parts description..

Re: Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127)

llorden4 — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 18:14:15 GMT

I have found success with iLogic to skip past this limitation, at least with custom iProperties that might work for you, I've had success with storage & retrieval of strings containing over 350 characters, so worthy of trying out on your issue.

iProperties.Value("Project", "Description") = "[127+ characters]"

Surprisingly, I haven't had any negative results from this operation that I've discovered as I would have expected some memory leakage or other data loss to occur from this run-over; but nothing yet.

Hope this helps.

Re: Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127)

moua.thao — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 22:33:21 GMT

Would anyone know a fast way to translate the special characters into ilogic? My descriptions often contain ", (), : etc...

It's kind of a pain to have to do a find and search replace for each special character.

ps, thanks for the solution @llorden4 !

Re: Increasing Parts description character limit or a workaround (127)

llorden4 — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 22:48:42 GMT

I do this quite a bit myself with self-generating part descriptions using iLogic. The trick is to concatenate your text together and the command syntax can get you if you're not familiar with it. If you have a carriage return, you can't have anything interrupting the concatenation, not even a remarked line. Use the "&" symbol as the concatenate (join) command. For example:

This works:

iProperties.Value("Project", "Description") = "My(Part)Is " &
Length &    'Length is a variable somewhere
chr(34) &
"long"

and would produce a result of: My(PartIs) 12" long.

However this wouldn't work:

iProperties.Value("Project", "Description") = "MyPartIs " &

'Length is a variable somewhere
Length &
chr(34) &
"long"

The remarked line " 'Length is a variable somewhere " interrupts the sequence as it's on a new line, but works just fine at the end of a line.

Placing your special characters within the quotes or using the chr(?) feature works just great.

Good luck!