Contest for the most useless Inventor Error Message

[ToddPig]

Inventor has some incredibly useless error messages, let see if we an find the MOST USELESS one...

kelly.young has embedded your image for clarity.

[Xun.Zhang]

Hi Todd,

Any more information such as when and what steps make the error happen? Have you loaded some custom addins?

It is hard to tell without any context of it.

Thanks!

[kelly.young]

@ToddPig I'll bite. My favorite was having to change the settings for Warn of overconstrained condition on every new install as it was set to the default (if memory serves).

Fortunately in 2019 there is an option to port over your settings! 

If anyone is still seeing this message, here's how to turn it off:

Please select the Accept as Solution button if a post solves your issue or answers your question.

[-niels-]

@kelly.young, how is that a useless message?

It's pretty clear what the error is and what will happen if you click accept... so i don't think that one counts.

While not fully useless i'm posting this one:

Mainly because you get a preview of what you want, thinking all is well, and then you don't get any indication of which edged "cannot be blended".

[kelly.young]

@-niels- I agree it is not useless, more of the workflow that turns it back on. For one day every year after installing the newest version, the first sketch created it would pop up again and I would shout of course I want it driven, how did you get back on?! Then have to go to the options and turn the notification off. 

The ability to transfer the settings over eliminated this and feels nice just getting the parenthesis I wanted so I can center things parametrically. When it happened this year I audibly yelled Yes, that is awesome! and looked around like a crazy person talking to myself. 

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately I don't still have the jpg of it but one of the most useless error messages I've seen was actually on Solidworks, seeing you have 19+ yrs on such, I'm sure you've run across it.

But it was basically a small red box with a white "x" in it. That was it.

Just like this, but square:

Haven't seen one like that in Inventor....yet.

[swalton]

Vault/Inventor 2018..

This one is 95% of the way to be useful. Vault/Inventor know which files need to be saved but they won't tell me so I can fix the problem.    The worst part is that it has been in Vault/Inventor for at least a decade.  

[Anonymous]

If I'm not mistaken, I usually see this when a user has made edits out of turn or when a user has a file where others made edits out of turn. Typically they'll have made changes on files that they had locally and had not checked out of Vault. Once the process was address, it was fine.

Not sure if that's what is happening with you though.

[swalton]

Sure, its a workflow issue that generates the error message.  My frustration is that the error message does not list the 3 files out of 5k unique files in an assembly that are at issue.  It gets very painful to find and correct the problem.

This specific message was triggered because Inventor 2018 wanted to migrate some ipart members that were last saved in Inventor 2014.  We only migrate files as-needed, so it can be years from initial check-in with Vault to the migration event.

[ToddPig]

Not an error message, but an error none the less.  Inventor does some stupid stuff sometimes, this one is pretty high up on the list.

kelly.young has embedded your image for clarity.

[ToddPig]

How can deleting a constraint create a cyclical constraint dependency?

kelly.young has embedded your image for clarity.

[Xun.Zhang]

Hello @ToddPig,

Circle dependency is case by case, is it possible to share the data to me and I can take a further investigation for the particular case. (xun.zhang@autodesk.com)

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

---

@swalton wrote:

Sure, its a workflow issue that generates the error message.  My frustration is that the error message does not list the 3 files out of 5k unique files in an assembly that are at issue.  It gets very painful to find and correct the problem.

---

Job security my good man, job security....;)

Trust me, I agree fully, especially since a good part of my day was to address these types of errors and whenever I asked the user what they did prior to getting the error, they'd say "Nothing". Thus it begins, one needle of hay at a time.

To a point I can understand the code needed to address or explain each error can be beyond massive, but in a case like this I feel the database already knows the links between the files that are effected, list them out and that alone would be a huge advantage for those of us that need to troubleshoot this.

[Anonymous]

Todd,

That's not what I'd considered an error, it's a flag. Telling me that the leader/dimension/etc has been orphaned by a process and is no longer attached or associated in some manner to what it once was. As I'm sure you know, this typically happens when a major enough change has happened to a file once it's been detailed and Inventor simply cannot guess well enough to reattach said dimension.

Highlighting dims like that is a huge help and can be easily fixed.

[jletcher]

[ToddPig]

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!!

[Cris-Ideas]

This just came up 🙂

Cris.

[jtylerbc]

This one isn't actually Inventor, so it's slightly off topic.  But it is by far the most useless error message I've ever seen overall.

There is an old document management software we use at my company (think something like Vault, but not really built for CAD files).  We're in the process of phasing it out, but our implementation of the new system is not really complete yet, so we still have to use the old one for some things.

We regularly get an error that says "The program has encountered a problem and needs to close."  Doesn't sound so silly at first, except that the error only occurs when trying to exit the program.  If clicking the "Close" button causes an error that closes the program, what exactly was the problem?  That's pretty much what it was supposed to do!

[Anonymous]

Oh I hate that one, had it happen a few days ago 20 minutes after starting my computer. 

[andrewiv]