Improvement for sick constraints in Assembly: Change Priority for troubleshooting

[Hunteil]

Concept: Imagine a tool that would allow you select a sick constraint, right click, change doctor priority.

It would force the program to essentially treat it like a healthy constraint and instead highlight the other inconsistent constraints as sick instead.

Also Inventor will need to include a clear all forced healthy tags button. Similar to the "Show Relationships" or "Show Sick Relationships" or "Hide All Relationships" buttons.

Benefits: If you haven't figured it out already; This would massively increase our speed in troubleshooting sick constraints in cases shown below. But primarily will assist in forcing the program to recognize that the constraint in question is correct and that something else is wrong. You could apply tags to all sorts of constraints you believe to be correct to ensure the program wouldn't consider them for it's Sick calculations and in essence allow us to eliminate factors one by one instead of simply guessing.

• Time regained (where before you'd waste so much time.)
• Easier/speed up Learning time
• Decrease barriers to Entry
• Higher ease of use
• Save Parameters
• Save Named Constraints

Example: We've all had the scenario where you have Sick constraints on perfectly healthy components. i.e. When a part somewhere else updated or changed for whatever reason, but your objects over here are tagged Sick b/c something it's constrained to is constrained again to it (some times is a long dependency chain). You end up checking all the constraints but still cannot find out why its Sick so you try to use Recover or Diagnose and it just suppresses or deletes the constraint and now everything is fine, but your part is now floating in space. This is a method a lot of people use, they just delete all the constraints and start over b/c it's easier than using the techniques given to us. This shouldn't be the solution. Imagine the time wasted.

Side note: Yes suppressing/deleting tends to (but not all the time) show us something else is causing something wrong. But blowing up half a complex assembly to figure out the cause shouldn't be the solution. Also sometimes you can't apply ground to those parts b/c you need to to move.

So the idea of Changing Priority with forcing healthy would really simplify this process b/c keep parts in place and instead showing other other options to track down.

[lance8]

Recently I have received some assembly files with poor modelling, be it in the sketches or the way the models have been placed-a good one is when the part sketches are not fully restrained (more than 1 dim required)

I try and make them fully constrained - avoids lots of errors and time wasting.

Use Adaptivity when you really need it, turn it off otherwise.

Flexible is handy as well, again use it as little as possible.

Otherwise INV will keep circling around, recalculating multiple solutions

Yes something like above would be nice, but there is probably a lot of things that need to be done to achieve this.

I find selecting the constraints which have failed (I mean could be 100+) and suppressing them to be best.

Work you way through them as you get the model back to shape.

I would like to add a counter or an indication when I fix a constraint, as INV often just tells you there are more errors still pending, when you are fixing 100 then each step forward would be nice with a reward to the end user.

[Hunteil]

@lance8 
A counter would be nice.

But still the suggestion is to basically re-prioritize Inventors checking program so you can continue to troubleshoot from a different point of view. Suppressing will only exacerbate the issue further by not telling us what else could be the wrong thing.

[lance8]

Bad constraints - finding the solution can be tricky no doubt

I don't think suppressing exacerbates the problem. Often but not always it makes the user think about how they have modelled the assembly or parts - are they really the best way to make it connect to other objects.

My recent work is with another user who is really starting out after using Autocad for years.

There was hundreds of constraints which had failed.

Suppressing the constraints enable me to work though each part and check for any unconstrained sketches or missing dims.  Sometimes things like the start may be an extrusion-all I had to do was make it symmetrical rather than asymmetrical. Then working in small blocks i quite quickly figured out how the assembly was put together and sorted out the faults. Suppression works but its not the silver bullet just another tool.

While I like your suggestion, you have to remember when there is a faulty constraint often there is another right nest to it which is healthy and could be the cause of the problem.

You almost want to disable some of the assembly and work on small sections getting them healthy and working through the rest

[gregory_nickol]

I have found the design doctor to be virtually useless for fixing constraint issues, because while it correctly identifies that there are conflicts, the ones it says are bad are more often than not good constraints.

My typical workflow (typically when working on something someone else has modeled) is to go and suppress everything in the relationships folder. I have undo and redo bound to buttons on my mouse, and I start un-suppressing in batches, making sure things are where they're supposed to be, until something goes wrong. If it doesn't work that way, I suppress all, then go down the browser and component by component turn batches of constraints on.

Having the ability to give constraints a "priority" would allow at the very least forcing the design doctor to recheck the conflicting constraints for a different likely culprit. With that change, instead of suppressing and re-enabling hundreds of constraints (which is a MASSIVE pain when you have positional representations that rely on some being suppressed at the master level..), it should be able to find the problem constraint faster.

[WillL84]

Agreed. Finding the conflicting restraint is a nightmare. Sure it shows you ONE of the conflicts (usually the one you just added) but not the other constraint that it's conflicting with. It's really annoying to have to start clicking around and figure it out. Being able to click on the exclamation point and have it say "conflicts with: Mate123" or something would be wonderful.

[taylorjonesXGNK9]

Big agree- this is an issue I have encountered whilst working on a modelling system for our structural team. Due to the system having a funky component that is defined by a sketches parameters and will be welded on, the system creates design doctor errors for an otherwise logical mate.