Versioning & name resolution in Inventor

[dgeise]

Hello all,  I've been away from Inventor since '07 so apologies in advance if this is a naive question:

I'm trying to dive back in & rapidly iterate over a design concept that involves multiple 'clean-sheet' (start over from scratch) redesigns of a relatively simple top-down driven assembly.  I like to create a 'design options' assembly that pulls in the different versions for visualization & side-by-side evaluation and so I can show off the evolution of the project to my partners.

In the past I'd just keep each version entirely seperate by creating a new folder in the filesystem to hold the files and new Inventor Project (.IPJ file) in order to avoid filename collisions, etc.  But this prevents me from creating the side-by-side design options assembly due to filename resolution conflicts.

It seems to me the only way to solve this is to keep every filename globally unique by appending a version tag to the filename.  I.e. MACHINE.v1.IAM, etc.  This solves the name resolution problem and has some other tangental benefits, but it also seems somewhat inpure and I expect will lead to a tangled mess, especially if the version concept is extended to minor revisions (MACHINE.v1.1.IAM)

From what I understand of iParts & iAssemblies, appending version tags onto the filename seems to be the solution, but since these down-stream files are generated from another document and not associateve, they're assumed to be static (I assume) and are not usually extensively modified once generated.

From what I know about Vault (never used before), it's basically a file revision-control system, and I assume that like most RCS systems it will make a given version available to the filesystem, but not allow Inventor to reference past versions in the vault repository.  So simply revising a single set of documents in-plate with no renaming and Inventor using Vault to reach into past version history doesn't seem to be possible.

To me (with my admittedly naive outsider perspective), ideally either Inventor files (IPT, IAM) would contain a 'weak' association with the IPJ file it was created under, and Inventor would use that to help in name conflict resolution.  This would enable a 'hierchy of projects' concept to be formed. Or perhaps the existing 'closest in tree' resolution & turning off the conflict warnings might work?

How to folks solve this probelm?  Is there a best practice being used that results in a clean solution to this problem?

Thanks in advance for considering my question.  If anyone has suggestions, please reply!

--Dave

[PaulMunford]

Multiple projects confuse me!

I would use single project, with design copy to create alteratives. Yes to unique file names. I can see it being awkward if you want to meld the alternatives into one at some point...