topic Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located?? in Inventor Forum

Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Preston_Reed — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:19:46 GMT

Hello, we are currently using inventor 24 and yesterday I realized while running some iLogic that changes material for structural items that we are missing our structural materials library. I don't know what happened but this changed sometime in the last week. So here is where I am at, we jumped from 22 to 24 so I downloaded the design data folder from both, making a local copy and then compared the entire folders using WinMerge. I know for sure 22 works, I opened a session of it since I still have it installed and the structural materials were there. Now I have been ctrl F'ing all of these files and I can find where the sheet metal materials are located, which are still working, but I cannot find where the structural materials are at.

Now, this is somewhat fixed at the moment, but I know its not fixed correctly. I tried yesterday to map my design data to a local copy of 22 and it would work for the most part. I had the structural materials I was missing but then I got an error saying I was missing some Large ANSI leader file or something. Another guy I work with this morning basically did the same thing but now its not having the error message about leaders. Anyway, even though its working I can see that the 22 and 24 file are still quiet different. Which makes sense, the 24 file has what appears to be a bunch of updates and added things, so sticking with the 22 file just sounds like a bandage.

So can someone who knows please tell me where the heck these files are located so I can try to fix this properly.

Thank you

BTW I'm missing channel, pipe, unistrut, angle iron, rect tube and so on.

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Frederick_Law — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:34:45 GMT

I believe those are custom material.

Look at 2022 Design Data folder for a adsklib file.

Unless they were saved into InventorMaterialLibrary.adsklib.

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Preston_Reed — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:39:50 GMT

Yeah idk how to decipher this gibberish lol

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Preston_Reed — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:42:09 GMT

But if this is the location, it might make sense. 22 is on the right and 24 is on the left. 22 has more data that the 24 doesn't have. Yes they are custom materials too

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Frederick_Law — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:03:52 GMT

You are looking too deep.

Stop comparing.

Just show files in "Design Data 2022\Materials" and "Design Data 2024\Materials" folder.

With date and file size.

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Preston_Reed — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:20:02 GMT

Ok, I see what your talking about, it appears the 24 file is a month newer than the old 22 file and is about a 1/4 the size. I'm still trying to figure out how this happened (about to get with IT to look at our backups) . Also I was trying to figure out where the materials are at, I can clearly see where the Sheetmetal stuff is, but the structural materials I guess are encrypted? I guess it doesn't really matter if I can see all the structural materials like I can see the sheet metal, if I can just copy the correct version over. Was just concerned if there was 24 specific information in the 24 file and if we used the 22 version then we would be missing info.

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Frederick_Law — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:28:54 GMT

@Preston_Reed wrote:
Was just concerned if there was 24 specific information in the 24 file and if we used the 22 version then we would be missing info.

Most likely not but you can do it properly.

If you still have 2022, use it to create custom material library and copy those new materials to it. So it's separated from Inventor library.

Copy that library to 2024 and add it in Project Appearance and Material library.

If you only got 2024, rename 2024 material library. Copy 2022 to 2024 folder. Do the above to split it. Rename 2024 back.

Next upgrade you just copy the custom library.

Re: Having an issue with Design Data and cannot for the life of me locate where structural materials are located??

Preston_Reed — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 18:21:58 GMT

Interesting, yeah ill give this a try