Content center trouble after each annual Inventor update

[john]

Hi.

We are three designers in our company who until now in the past ten years have been happy with creating projects on a shared network drive, hence we have deliberately not used Vault to avoid too much complexity in our lives.

But every time we update our Inventor to latest release (running 2024 now) we have trouble with our content center libraries. They go missing, get duplicated, are corrupted, you name it - trouble one way or the other.

Have tried multiple times to place our custom content center library in a folder on our network drive and reference to it in the Inventor "defaults", but it doesn't work - that crap apparently needs to be installed on a C:\ folder to work.

What am I missing? Is it possible to keep running our projects locally and but use Vault strictly for our ever-growing custom content center?

[blandb]

Just make a company specific library and don't use the defaults every year. Just copy what you need, modify to fit your company needs and just use it. Copy what bolts, nut, washers, etc. Modify descriptions, part numbers etc. that your company uses and then you don't have to worry about it. Have the defaults for if you need to copy something later, or need a 1 off, but make the default be your company specific library. Next year, just migrate your custom library and you are done. Same project file, same everything. No need to change and redo.

[john]

Thanks, sounds like a sensible plan.

Will do some tests, however we have in the past tried to just copy the *.idcl file and associated folders with nuts & bolts over to a common location (a folder on a network disk that all computers in the company can access). We referenced this network location in the Inventor options for content center and it failed to read/find it.

Will try again, must have done something wrong.

[blandb]

In your ipj, just set the default location of CC. In Application Options, Content Center tab, since you are not using Vault, just use desktop content and set the location of the IDCL file.

You shouldn't have to copy and paste, if you have a single project file for your company, everyone can use the same IPJ file. Then there is only one file to maintain. I've only used vault in a multi-user environment, so some experimentation may be required with what you are trying to achieve. You could create a separate IPJ file as a CAD ADMIN that points to all the same locations, but you have read-write access to add items to Content Center, but everyone else is read-only.

[Frederick_Law]

There is CC library files and folder.

Also generated CC files and folder.

Are they both on network?

Did you put custom CC in it's own library?

[john]

Ok, think we may have got off to a bad start ten years ago. The way we work is that we make a new project (ipj) (example: P069..) for every new product we make. We have over two hundred Inventor projects now. Each time we start a new one we make a new subfolder on our network drive and make a new single user project and on the prompt of importing a library for the project we move over the library we want. It's a bit fiddly and has given us a few duplicates over the years due to inconsistent use.

Thanks for your help so far!

[mslosar · Accepted solution]

As noted above, you'll need to:

• create a folder for the place CC files on your network drive and EVERYONE will have to reference it the same (N:\Inventor\Content Center Files) or something like that.
• You will need to put your IDCL files somewhere else on the network (N:\Inventor\Content Center Libraries)
• Inside Inventor, in Tools\Application Settings, you'll need to go the File tab and set the Content Center Files location to match the folder where your placed CC files will be (N:\Inventor\Content Center Files)
• You then need to go to the Content Center tab and set the folder for Inventor to look at to be the library path on the network (N:\Inventor\Content Center Libraries).
• Finally, you'll need to have the IPJ file(s), you'll need to go the Folder Options section and set the network folder for Content Center (N:\Inventor\Content Center Files).

Then, you should be good to go.

[john]

Excellent, thanks a lot for this! Will do this, thanks for saving me for a lot of pain.
Think that an element of confusion for me is all the multiple places on the harddrive where this Autodesk stuff installs itself. In my head I'm still old-school and everything is in one structured path. In nowadays Windows it's all over the place and I have AD stuff going back to eight years that haven't been uninstalled cleanly. . Sorry for the rant, just get a bit annoyed over how complex the future has become😅

[SBix26]

Just to reinforce what the others have said-- at my last job we worked exactly as you are hoping to do.  Content libraries were on a network drive, we made a new project for every job (copies of a common "template" project), and CC files were placed within the job folder so that every job was completely self-contained.

Worked fine.  It helped that we had really a really good network infrastructure and top of the line servers.

Disclaimer: we eventually moved everything into Vault, due to multiple users on the same projects.  I can't remember if we converted to Vault libraries or stayed with .idcl (desktop) libraries, though.

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Sam B

Inventor Pro 2024.1.1 | Windows 10 Home 22H2

[mslosar]

After having done the exact same thing, putting them in vault is substantially easier all around. As is running a single project file.