Content Center Migration with Upgrade

[jporter]

Product Design Suite 2018 should drop in the next couple weeks. Every time I upgrade, I seem to spend a month adding folders to my project file, resolving files, and generally killing my productivity because content center parts won't resolve. This time, I want to be proactive and understand what I am doing so I don't kill a month of productivity when opening files from the 2017 version of Inventor. Can someone give a good list of the "to do" items to avoid unresolved files once I upgrade? 

[Mark.Lancaster]

@jporter

Desktop Content Center or managed by Vault?

Do you have your own read/write custom content center library?

Is the location of published content center (when placing from into an assembly), in a shared location or somewhere on your hard drive?

[jporter]

I am not on vault. I do have my own library in addition to the standard content. All of the content is local to my machine. 

[Mark.Lancaster]

@jporter

So my next question is.. When you place a content center component into your model, does that folder structure include an Inventor year or are they dumped in the same location as all other releases?

If they are separated by a year release you may want to consider having a common content center folder location and thus when you upgrade they still are pulling from the same location.  There's really no need to separate yearly releases of content center after they are placed into an assembl.  But if they are separated by year, just cut and paste the existing content center folder over to the new (year) location.

Also make sure you have the option "refresh standard out of date component on placement" selected in Tools/Application Options/Content Center tab as well.

Once you have the library configure under your active Inventor project/config content center..  You will have to update you custom read/write library using the update wizard

Remember when a content center component is placed into an assembly it never looks back to the actual content center library/family table and its always based on the location defined by your active project file/folder option or tools/application option/file tab.

[jporter]

Yes, I did allow Inventor to create the libraries by release year folder. 

So, what you are suggesting is that I create an independent content center folder that isn't driven by release year in the path, then copy and paste my existing files into that folder. Finally, I reference that folder in the project file. Finally, I update my custom libraries. Is that correct? 

[Mark.Lancaster]

Yes..  That's what I would do and have informed others to do the same..  Good luck and let us know how it goes. 

[jporter]

Will do. Once the design suite is released, I'll follow these instructions and report back. 

[n.schotten]

Hi Mark,

A question about the CC. what does the refresh do and does that also migrate the files in the CC library location?

Would it be handy to migrate the CC files, just as that it is handy to migrate the regular library folder(s)? Rather than IV keeping popping up wanting to save library files for it wants to migrate them.

Niels

[Mark.Lancaster]

@n.schotten

I assume you are talking about refresh standard components, is that correct?

The refresh standard component function allows the user to update his/her CC components to the latest in their entire assembly.  But it only works on CC components that came from a read/write library that have been changed.  Components that need to be migrated from Inventor version to a newer version is not considered a change.   You may want to review this article and the refresh standard function is described at the end of the article.