derived part - change parent

[Anonymous]

Our default workflow (without Vault) to substitute a derived parent part is: save the original part as a new number then close the original, rename it temporarily and then open up the new derived part and when it cant find the parent just point it to the new one. The issue with this is if the original parent part is in any other assembly obviously you have to unload it from RAM before you can change its name (i.e. shut everything down)....this is a pain.

Isn't there a way in 2018 to just open the derived component (a mirror of the parent) and just point it to the newly saved part?

I hope I'm clear enough, I feel I'm way too verbose in describing  what I want to do. 

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Albert,

This has been discussed several times in the past. The main reason why this workflow is not yet supported is about how the associativity is established. Derive Assembly or Derive Part relies on the unique source document ID to map objects. If you change the source to a file with a different document ID, the Derive feature and all downstream features will simply fail to compute. Inventor documents only share the same doc ID when they are saved by  Save Copy As or Save As. If you start a file new, the doc ID will be different.

Let me ask you this. Is the new source file a copy of the old source file? If yes, you could hide the old source file and let Inventor resolve to the new source file, Derive should work.

Many thanks!

[karthur1 · Accepted solution]

I do the same thing.  Attached here is an ilogic file written by Mike Deck (Adesk).  This was discussed in this thread if you want to read it.  I have attached the code here as well.  I use it all the time to do exactly the thing you describe.

The only problem that I run into sometimes is if the new part that using to replace the reference is very different from the original, it will not allow you to change it out. It does give you a message to let you know there is a problem.  The code is not perfect, but it does what I ask 99% of the time.

There is also an IdeaStation thread on the issue as well.

Kirk

[Anonymous]

We are mostly using this workflow where the basic design is identical but there are just a few tweaks for the new design and we always save as to keep the part i.d. the same. It's not a huge deal as long as I don't decide to do this while the part that I want to do a temp name change to is use in a dozen other assemblies I have open....windows doesn't like you changing file names while the file is still open! lol

I know all of this is taken care of in Vault Pro and re-using a designs is easy but we are not quite ready for it yet.

[karthur1]

Give the iLogic code a shot.  If you are not familiar with iLogic, it is super easy to setup and even easier to use.

Kirk

[steve_lindley]

@Anonymous I know I'm late to this thread, but just stumbled on it. In case you didn't persevere with the ilogic, it may help to know that we don't use Vault yet either, but we do use derived parts quite a bit. We always use Design Assistant which comes free with the suite. You can simply copy the base part to a new number or replace it. Generally, we do this as early in the process as possible so that the base part isn't vastly different to the original - if at all. 

[sschulteH6WZ3]

Mabe this should go on a different thread, but I often see people putting code in text documents on this thing. What does that do? Where would you put that? It does not seem like you would crack open Inventor then stick it in some where in those thousands of lines and hope it does not destroy the application?

[SBix26]

Investigate iLogic in the Help pages for your version of Inventor.  This is a powerful customization utility for Inventor.

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Sam B
Inventor Pro 2020.1.1 | Windows 7 SP1
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