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As the title says: make it possible to flip the direction of a dimension in a sketch when you make the dimension negative. I used this feature a lot in SolidWorks in the past.
Agree with everyone in this post: This is not only a convenience feature. It's far too easy to change one dimension value only to have another dimension "flip" orientation and break your model. This is a bug that needs to be fixed.
Autodesk did acknoledge this in some forum post that I just can't seem to find right know. They just do not seem to be interested in fixing it. I do believe that Autodesk Inventor to them is end-of-life. Autodesk is putting practically all their efforts in Fusion 360. Seeing how many efforts and updates Fusion gets and how shockingly few Inventor gets. It's probably not cost effective to fix these basic issues in Inventor. The features we do get each with each new release is more for marketing then anything else.
Anyway, we are caught between a rock end a hard place now. Inventor is broken in it's core and Fusion is not nearly a suitable replacement at this time. I am sure we will all be moving to Fusion when it's up to parr, but for now it's just working through all frustrations that the Inventor Software throws at us.
But I guess for the many people that do not use features like, iLogic, Parametric driven dimensions, and don't have to adjust their models, Inventor might still suit them very well. I Still believe Inventor could be awsome if somehow these basic flaws were to be fixed.
When an idea status is set to "Future Consideration" this means our engineering team is evaluating technical feasibility. Such investigations can often times result in unfavorable news (meaning delivering a solution might take longer, more resources, or expertise than we would be able to afford, within a given time frame). This is why some ideas have been set to "Future Consideration" for a long period of time. We do not go back and set the idea status back to "Gathering Support" as ideally we would like to schedule the work (since after all it was a good idea and has solid community support). Due to revenue recognition, we are unable to make promises or commit to any fix or timelines. This is simply the process that we have to adhere to within the public ideas forum. Rest assured the Inventor team is very busy and we apologize for any perceived delay in attempting to deliver upon the 9,000+ ideas on this board. 😉 Please understand, we are doing our very best. If you are interested in what we are currently working on you can join our internal feedback community here: https://Autode.sk/InventorBeta” to take a sneak peek or even test alpha / beta functionality before it gets released. In the meantime, we thank you all for your continued patience.
This idea has been implemented within Autodesk Inventor 2026.1. Please review the Inventor 2026.1 What's New article here. For more information regarding how you may leverage the feature, and please review this page. Special thanks to everyone who cast a vote for it.
Great news! Not having to delete dimensions to flip them is a big improvement.
I'm unable to test this new feature at the moment: can anyone clarify the following questions about the new functionality?
1. Does setting a dimension to a negative value automatically flip it? As OP suggested?
2. If so, does the dimension value remain negative, or is the expression modified to return a positive value?
3. In the past, dimensions had a tendency to automatically flip when not desired (ex: other dimensions are changed, and the solver decides flipping a dimension is the best solution). Does this change resolve those issues by enforcing a fixed "direction" to each dimension? Or will we still have those same issues?
Thank you for your questions. Here are my comments regarding the new functionality:
Adding a negative value to a dimension does not flip it. The underlying solver always interprets dimensions as positive values, even if a negative value is entered.
When a negative value is added to a dimension, it will remain negative. This aspect of the functionality has not been changed.
The flip option is a one-time change only and does not affect future modifications to dimensions or sketches.
I hope this helps to clarify the new functionality.
Thank you for the prompt response and confirmation. Unfortunately, I have to point out that this implementation seems to have missed the mark in terms of solving the issues these community members identified and voted on. The conversations in this thread mainly focused on 2 points:
Allowing negative values to be entered into 2D sketch dimensions, which would cause the dimension to "flip" instead of throwing an error "The expression evaluates out of the expected range"
Improving the stability of the 2D sketch solver to make it more deterministic. As many users have mentioned, there are many cases where the solver inadvertently flips dimensions because they lack a strict direction, and this can easily break complex models. The workarounds are helpful in the short-term, but a real solution is still needed long term.
Marking this Idea as "Implemented" without addressing these two major concerns is extremely discouraging to the 400+people who voted on it. Are there any plans to actually improve the 2D solver and resolve both issues properly, or is nothing further being done because this Idea is considered "Implemented" with the "Flip Dimension" button?
