Not sure if it's a bug or not - It's inconsistent, at least

[YannickEnrico]

Hey there

I've come to experience an inconsistency in Inventor. Whether there's a reason for it or not, I don't know, but now I'm bringing it up so Autodesk can either fix it, or tell me it's working as intended.

If you use this workflow:

Sketch with multiple closed areas -> Extrude one of the areas -> Visibility on sketch -> Extrude one of the other areas. Result: Auto-share sketch.

If you use this workflow, however:

Sketch with multiple separate lines -> Contour Flange on one of the lines -> Visibility on sketch. Result: You can't make another contour flange, unless you've rightclicked the sketch and shared it. Otherwise you can't choose a different line from the same sketch. See attached image.

[SBix26]

Long ago, the only way to use the same sketch for multiple features was exactly as you describe for the sheet metal features.  My guess is that when the "auto-sharing" functionality was introduced to the basic modeling tools, it was not extended to the sheet metal tools for reasons of resource availability, conflict with other improvements, etc.  Probably still on some team's to-do list, but keeps getting pushed down by other priorities...

In any case, I'm sure it's not a bug, because that's the way Inventor used to work across all tools.  Just another inconsistency to go on @Curtis_Waguespack's list...

Sam B

Inventor Professional 2017.3.1
Vault Workgroup 2017.0.1
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit, SP1
Inventor Certified Professional

[YannickEnrico]

Either that, or they thought they had fixed it? 🙂

Anyhow, I just wanted to inform Autodesk about it in case they don't know 🙂

I'm still relatively new to inventor (since 2011), so I can't relate inconsistencies to anything older than that 😉

[SteveMDennis]

@YannickEnrico

I will have some Sheet Metal experts and senior QA guys take a look at this. At first blush it looks like an oversight to me and we should address it for consistency if possible.

Honestly what happens is an engineer with expertise in one area (let's say part modeling, i.e. extrude) makes an improvement and doesn't know or realize there are equivalent workflows in assemblies, drawings, or sheet metal because they have not worked in those areas much.

Senior people like me are supposed to catch these but it's a lot to watch all the time.  We do our best.

I'll have a few people followup and hopefully get a defect/completion story created for this.

[YannickEnrico]

Hey, no worries. Mistakes happen - Especially in such a big program. 

As I stated earlier, I just wanted to inform about the inconsistency, and for what I know, it could have been intended 🙂

[SteveMDennis · Accepted solution]

@YannickEnrico

Got a quick reply from my SM expert and he agrees this is just an oversight and we should be able to correct it.

Trying to get it added to my team's project list for one of our next releases (potentially even one of the incrementals, I see no technical reason it wouldn't be correctable in a "non-major" release)

Stay tuned and hopefully we can address this sooner rather than later, but I can't make promises! 🙂 

[YannickEnrico]

Awesome - Thanks for getting back to me this fast 🙂