Ask the Expert with Expert Elite Mike Thomas - Inventor

Hi Mike,

A question on revisions of parts, assemblies,drawings in non vault environment? How to control revisions of these files and or should file names contain revisions? We are transitioning from AutoCAD where only one file used to have a revision associated now there is a river and you can start sinking very quickly🚰 A small example that could be scaled up including how to retrieve an old version would be great. I know vault is probably the correct way to go but that never happens immediately and in the mean time users are stuck trying to make sense of the situation. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) when you rotate a view Inventor maintains the dimensions as is (horizontal, vertical, etc) and then attempts to reassociate them to the geometry. 

Dan S from Autodesk highlighted that if you are using Model Based Definition in the part or assembly and you extract the dimensions from the MBD that if you rotate the view the dimensions will rotate as well.

Mike Thomas

As we discussed on the call your options include:

1. Using Inventor Read-only on the shop floor which they can then view the models natively (no conversion required)
2. Exporting to DWFx
3. Exporting to PDF (3D)

Mike Thomas

By using option 1) it is neccesary to add the possibilty in Inventor Read-Only mode to activate AddIns - otherwise it isn´t possible to use this option with PDM (SAP, GAIN, ...)

I can't comment on SAP, GAIN, or others, but with Vault you do not need the Vault add-in for Inventor to make Inventor Read-Only work in this scenario. As long as the IAM and IPT file associativity on the system are set to Inventor Read-Only, when opening the file from the Vault Thick or Thin (web) client the file opens in a read-only state with Inventor Read-Only.

Perhaps you can achieve the same thing with other PDM systems? In this scenario the goal is not to allow changes, but to simply open the file read-only.

Mike Thomas

To open Assemblies from these PDM, the AddIn has to be activated in Inventor, otherwise I can´t load the whole structure of this assembly. This is an crucial point!!!

The goal not to allow changes is clear to me. I´ll use Inventor Read-Only to view parts and assemblies in Inventor native format.

Efforts need to be made by Autodesk to secure the use of Inventor read-only with other PDM-solutions.