Make Design Assistant work with Model States

[steve_lindley]

Although Design Assistant worked previously with assemblies that had Levels of Detail, in 2022, it no longer works with Model States. Load any file with model states into Design Assistant and the rows will be greyed out to prevent edit. Autodesk confirms this is deliberate behaviour. Any re-naming now involves breaking links and resolving them. 

Please just make Design Assistant work again!

[jingyi.liu]

Hi Steve

Thanks for your feedback, we're aware of the limitation, it needs to be prioritized with other requests.

Regards,

[suomenvaimennin]

Autodesk refers to this as a limitation. This is a huge mistake. The workaround to copy and edit files is slow and tedious. Model States is a disaster and needs to be fixed ASAP.

[Yijiang.Cai]

This has been tracked as [INVGEN-52532]

[Yijiang.Cai]

@steve_lindley  & @suomenvaimennin ,

We are currently working to enhance this functionality. You can access this from the Inventor Feedback Community. If you don’t already have access you can apply using http://Autode.sk/InventorBeta. Once you have access you will be able to access the most recent pre-release build or try it virtually, and this build can be run in the browser at https://feedback.autodesk.com/project/article/default.html?cap=FB144137-35EE-42C9-9624-E3793B19A0B2&... 

Thanks,

River

[suomenvaimennin]

Just a heads up. You commented that "Any re-naming now involves breaking links and resolving them." If you do this it works, but the Bill of Materials does not get updated. Inventors "fix" is to copy the BOM into Excel, rename them and copy back into the BOM, which is just ridiculous. 

[JBerns]

I recently read that only 20% of Inventor users use Vault.

That could mean that there are a LOT of users using Design Assistant (DA) to manage designs.

I hope DA is not being limited to push users towards Vault use.

[dan_szymanski]

This idea has been implemented within Autodesk Inventor 2022.2. Special thanks to everyone who cast a vote for it.

[steve_lindley]

@dan_szymanski 

Reporting back, now using Design Assistant 2025, I'd like to point out that the functionality is still not quite right with regards to Model States. I can't find any other posts that are recent, hence tagging onto this again.

My example today, which is one I've come across a few times since the original complaint, involves opening an assembly, which has a model state and that contains parts and subassemblies, which also have model states.

Firstly, when I'm in the 'Open Autodesk Inventor File' dialogue box, within Design Assistant, there's no 'Option' button to choose which model state to load. That's my first point to be aware of. You might think that this is unnecessary, but I think that it loads which ever model state was last saved and therefore if a part was suppressed in that model state, you'll likely see an error message and any renaming will fail in some form or other.

My suggestion is to give us that 'Options' button please like we see in the 'Open' dialogue box in Inventor, so we can make sure we're opening a model state with everything loaded / nothing suppressed.

Secondly, if you try to rename a part or subassembly that contains a model state, again it seems to struggle.

Today's example, I opened a top level assembly with 166 files in it. I renamed one part file, which was used in two subassemblies. The part did not have a model state and the rename worked fine. I also renamed the two subassemblies in the same operation, which did have model states. Whilst the assembly files themselves renamed, they both lost the reference to the part file and had to be resolved in Inventor. Not only that but the assembly level above these became stuck in the saving process. By this I mean, it renamed itself with .newver.iam and hence had to be edited manually to get rid of the '.newver'.

I assume the problem is with the fact that model states allow different iProperties for each state? At the minute we see only one instance of the iProperties - perhaps the instance that is used in the model state of the assembly. Would it be possible to get a tick box for 'Edit all model states' so that the rename captures all of them. Or during the save process, could we be presented with a pop up window that says "Part XXX has the following model states... Please edit as needed and OK to continue" and open the spreadsheet that controls them?

[steve_lindley]

A bit more feedback on this issue...

I had another instance again today. Same top level assembly as commented on yesterday, but renaming a totally different ipt that contained a model state.

To give some detail that might help understand the file structure.

The top level I opened contains a few subassemblies: One is named SS-1200. One is named SS-1201.

In SS-1200 there is a subassembly named SS-1200-03.

In SS-1201 there is a subassembly named SS-1200-05.

The ipt was originally named SS-1200-03-32. I was changing it to SS-1200-03-11. 

The ipt appears in both SS-1200-03 & SS-1200-05. 

I've attached a screen shot of the error message that appeared when attempting to save. This was the only change I was making.

After choosing OK, I got the usual message of "Updates complete". After waiting for the refresh, I then saw the following message:

After OK, nothing else appeared out of place in Design Assistant, so I closed it. In Inventor, in the open dialogue box, as before, the SS-1200.iam is now SS-1200.newver.iam.

The ipt has been renamed successfully. 

When I get rid of the newver from the filename of the iam and try to open it, I have to resolve for the ipt.

[dan_szymanski]

@steve_lindley,

May I suggest you author a separate Idea within the Ideas forum for this ask (so that we can track it separately)?  We have authored a story for future consideration (INVGEN-81602).  Thank you for bringing it to our attention.