"Place and ground first component at origin" option switching OFF - cause found

[Cris-Ideas]

Hi everyone,

I have finally found what causes "place and ground first component at origin" application option to switch off automatically.

It is creating a feature driven pattern.

It took me some time to figure this one out.

Please support me and inform autodesk you want this fixed.

Here is a video.

[AlexeyN]

Hi!

Thanks a lot!! I've made a support request about that as Autodesk VAD. Waiting for a reply!

[Robert.Reid]

You just found "1" of the many issues that keeps unchecking that box. It's not just patterning. Autodesk has known about this for the last 3 releases and has done NOTHING FIX WHAT YOU HAVE!!!

[Cris-Ideas]

Hi,

That I didn't know.

On one of related threads I have read Johnson Shiue from Autodesk writing they: "do not have a verified way of reproducing this behaviour" (quoting from my memory so maybe not exactly word by word).

From what you write it seems they knew.

Anyway, only way to get this fixed is to constantly expressing this in public, like in this forum.

What I found is rally good and bad news for me. As I use feature driven patterns all the time "place and ground option" will never work for me, but good news is that I can stop bothering to turn this on. 😉

Cris.

[SteveMDennis]

Cris,

 I have never seen that but that certainly looks like the Place from CC command is unsetting it to accomplish the pattern following and not setting it back to what it was!

I have to step out of the office this afternoon but I will look into this in the morning.

Good find and with a reproducible case we will certainly look to fix this and see if any other commands are following the same (bad) example...

[SteveMDennis]

Cris,

 I am having a problem getting autodrop to work on my debug build to look at the problem.

Our lead QA guy @Anonymous was unable to reproduce it with 2017 with autodrop and a pattern.

I'd like Johnson to work with you to get the data you're using and see if we can reproduce it here at Autodesk.

[AlexeyN]

Development answers me, that the issue is known and will be fixed in a future release of Inventor. We should wait for a hotfix for a currend and previous releases. But they can not guarantee the date.

PS. The cause is defining any Design Accelerator component (e.g Shaft) or insert Content center part with idrop as you said, Cris.

[Cris-Ideas]

Hello Steve,

Nice of you to join this topic.

Having this opportunity I must ask this questions:

Did Autodesk really had no information what is causing this issue before?

Was there any action undertaken by Autodesk to find the cause of the problem? 

This problem continues at least since 2014 version, and many users complained about that. I suppose there also ware numerous support requests made via subscription.

What I also would really want to know is:

Why Autodesk does not provide any place dedicated for reporting bugs?

Idea station is really not a good place for it.

I suppose you are a person who can give answer to those questions, that surly not only I am interested in knowing answers for.

As for me I have much work this time and have very little time to write to Autodesk, although have many bugs documented and accumulated for sending.

I will however try few things during working and send you something regarding this "grounding" issue.

Cris.

[AlexeyN]

Autodesk just published an article about it.

[SteveMDennis]

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@AlexeyN wrote:

Development answers me, that the issue is known and will be fixed in a future release of Inventor. We should wait for a hotfix for a currend and previous releases. But they can not guarantee the date.

PS. The cause is defining any Design Accelerator component (e.g Shaft) or insert Content center part with idrop as you said, Cris.

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Alexey,

 You said "Development answers me" but all I see in that thread is Johnson saying "we can't reproduce it" and then me saying I'll look at it. NOTE: I still cannot reproduce it on my debug build and Johnson can't on his release build. We are not saying we don't believe you but I can't fix what I can't reproduce, software can be flaky sometimes. If I can reproduce it I can fix it but I have to reproduce it first.

We never guarantee dates.

We are still trying to reproduce it internally, I see it in Cris' video and I can guess at a reason why it might happen but that doesn't help me change the code yet.

[AlexeyN]

Dear Steven, I am an Autodesk Distributor, and simply wrote the issue yesterday to support team via Autodesk Partner Center. Here is an answer I got today:

"Dear Алексей Никулин

Thank you for choosing Autodesk Support. Here is the recommended resolution to your case:

I checked this incident in our system and found that we are logged this issue 2 years ago. As we did not had publish articles policy 2 years ago, so here has no public articles for this. 

Attached a document for your reference. 

Developer team code fixed this issue about 3 months ago, so in future version, inventor will not has this issue. But I couldn't guarantee the date of hotfix and update.  

I will publish this article to the knowledge center, the link should be: 

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/article/Place-and-ground-first-component-at-origin-becomes-unchecked

It may need 1 day to come into effect. 

Please let me know if this solved your issue. Thanks in advance. 
 

Best regards,

Henry Huang
Autodesk Support Team"

[SteveMDennis]

Cris,

Did Autodesk really had no information what is causing this issue before?

Was there any action undertaken by Autodesk to find the cause of the problem? 

I am one developer and Johnson is on QA engineer. We happen to be two of the most senior, experienced Inventor staff. I cannot answer for anyone but us. If we replied to the thread then we attempted to reproduce it. Neither of us can reproduce this yet, but we will continue to try.

Based on the article I can only assume a Product Support staff member has reproduced it or used your video as the "proof" to alert all users to the issue and let you know we are looking into it.

Why Autodesk does not provide any place dedicated for reporting bugs?

We do, call your product support numbers or use this forum (this is not Ideas forum). Staff (product support, QA, and Development) monitor these forums regularly.  It sounds as if you want a place for you to enter defects directly into our systems and I have no idea why we don't but if we did I would be likely flooded with "bugs" that aren't really bugs. In this case I agree with you this is an issue that we need to fix and as soon as we can reproduce it we will.

[SteveMDennis]

Alexey,

 Thanks for sharing that, I will contact him and see to what defect he is referring to.

All I can tell you personally is I found out about this issue yesterday, never before that, so maybe some other team is looking into it in parallel.

[AlexeyN]

Steven,
You're welcome! Hope it helps. We are all waiting for the fix.

[Cris-Ideas]

Steve

How it is possible that if you are most senior, experienced inventor stuff, you can only speak for your self?

In our company, for example, if I am most senior construction method specialist I am responsible for supervising everything that is going on in this field. So of course I can not know exactly who is doing what at this time and what is level of knowledge of other employees.

But when our client comes and asks me: What is your company opinion in this matter, or why your company did this or that, or what is your company planing to do to fix this? I am not to answer "I can only speak for my self".

So I am little disappointed you did not give any answer whether Autodesk had or did not have knowledge about existence of the problem and its causes and whether there ware any actions undertaken to solve this. I really do not suppose you have no knowledge about your company's policy and information it has.

I would like also to make two remarks concerning reporting bugs, and reproducing bad behaviour.

I will start with "place dedicated for reporting bugs".

You write "We do, call your product support numbers or use this forum (this is not Ideas forum). Staff (product support, QA, and Development) monitor these forums regularly."

This is really not that good looking form user experience. I am regularly exchange email with autodesk regarding bugy or bad behaviour of Inventor. I however feel I am getting very little in terms of effects.

I am not informed if problem I have documented is considered a bug, is there an chance anyone will be doing anything with it, is there any predictable timeframe when some fixes can be expected.

I cannot check what is current status of a bug that was reported and qualified as a bug.

So in reality there is no place where users could report bugs in a way that would also allow them to get something from the effort they make to document, describe and supply them to you (autodesk).

I believe that users deserve to get information about progress in fixing bugs in a software they are paying, especially if they actively participate documenting them and supplying Autodesk with data.

Due to Autodesks policy in this matter I have an impression that it is the case that Autodesk really does very little to fix bugs as they continue endlessly threw following relies of the software, or sometimes after being fixed they are introduced again.

On the other hand you provide this "Idea station" where users can vote for new ideas. This big difference in approach to fixing what you have, and what is not working and to "inventing new stuff you can than sell" is hard to bear.

As for "being able to reproduce a problem"

I have made video clearly showing this bad behaviour. You should imagine it is hard to believe software works different on your computer.

It is similar to this joke about IT guy. Most often when you call him because something is not working on your computer he says "Strange, it works for me." Does this answer giv you anything, but anger?

Taking only this problem with "place and ground option". On this forum there are numerous threads regarding this issue, and there are many users confirmed this is happening. Perhaps no one had narrowed it down to the exact moment it is happening, but number of reports "this is not working properly" should be enough to admit this is a bug and start to look for it.

AlexN gave link to an article "Autodesk just published" In this article from October 26 it says"

"Users reported that "Place and ground first component at origin" option becomes unchecked in every Inventor product from 2013 release onwards"

How ridiculously this sounds. Autodesk was informed this is not working long before. Users on this forum posted this regarding AI 2014. Johnson was participating in this threads.

So clearly this forum is not used as a place for bug reporting.

As for my self I have tried few things and have been able to reproduce this behaviour in relation to placing CC parts, even without autodrop.

Is it really that no one from autodesk is able to reproduce this simple bugy behaviour.

Please call me on skype or organise remote session, you will be able to reproduce this on my computer. I am willing to help.

Subject with bugs in inventor is so huge that it is really extremely frustrating not being able to get any reliable information what is being fixed and what will never be.

Another example I am having in the same time is this "PDF Layer mess up". I have posted this on forum, send via subscription, sent to Johnson directly, made videos, provided data sets. and?

And totally nothing, or even worst.

When reported this problem for AI2015 I got information form, Autodesk employee Jon Dean, that it is fixed in 2017 (2017 that was not relised by that time) + that it will probably not be fixed in 2015 and 2016 versions. 

Now I am using AI2017 and guess what. THIS IS STILL NOT WORKING. Autodesk Customer Support gave me information that not only was not true but was not even verified. And that's not the firs time.

So generally I feel I can send to Autodesk bug reports but without any hope this will make them more likely to be fixed or even to get any info if there is a plan to do anything about them.

Is this how Autodesk wants its customers to feel like?

Really?

Cris.

[SteveMDennis]

Cris,

 I am sorry you are disappointed with your relationship with Autodesk regarding your defects.

I will not speak for the other 7000 employees of Autodesk.

I am now looking at your issue to the best of my ability.

Just to give you some inside knowledge, me and my fellow developers spend at least 25% of our time working on legacy defects, we do not spend all of our time on new functionality.

Seeing a defect on your machine certainly proves it is an issue but I have to be able to reproduce it on my machine to debug it and find out where the software is going wrong.

I will continue to dig into this and reply here when I have any technical info to share.

[SteveMDennis]

Cris and Alexey,

Here is what I have discovered, this issue has been fixed in our internal 2018 version and in 2017 R3 (soon to be released). I am trying to find out if it was fixed in a recent 2016 SP2 update or not, I am unsure at this moment.

So if you apply 2017 R3 you will no longer see this issue.

[MrSmithtastic]

I'm still having this issue in Inventor 2017. You say it's fixed in R3? I'm only on SP1, how can I get R3? Am I missing something?

Thanks

[mcgyvr]

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@jsmith8H3NA wrote:

I'm still having this issue in Inventor 2017. You say it's fixed in R3? I'm only on SP1, how can I get R3? Am I missing something?

Thanks

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@MrSmithtastic Are you a subscription customer?

If so you can download R3 here.. 

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/downloads/caas/downloads/content/inventor-2...

[MrSmithtastic]

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@mcgyvr wrote:

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@jsmith8H3NA wrote:

I'm still having this issue in Inventor 2017. You say it's fixed in R3? I'm only on SP1, how can I get R3? Am I missing something?

Thanks

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@MrSmithtastic Are you a subscription customer?

If so you can download R3 here.. 

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/downloads/caas/downloads/content/inventor-2...

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Thanks, I am subscription customer (or at least the company I work for is). But why hasn't this updated automatically through the Autodesk desktop app?