Official support for Inventor Headless (aka JobServer, aka JobProcessor)

[freesbee]

I would love if Autodesk could support Inventor Headless officially.

As several of my other ideas this one would address an issue that is probably not known by the vast majority of Inventor users. This limitation in design automation possibilities for Inventor could be addressed, even if some minor changes in some Iventor internal mechanisms would be required. Some specific cases have already been discussed with Autodesk PMs, and documenting the limitation in one Idea will be an optimal way to begin the project, as usual.

Specific Case histories will follow the primary post. If anybody is aware of a use case that is not yet documented here below, he is welcome to add his case to the post.

For all CAD Admins and "non CAD Admins", please vote up this ideal: you will benefit of this as well.

[freesbee]

1 - Pure Licensing Issues

Most companies that I know with one or more "Headless Inventor" in use are structured companies with 10+ licenses, and they are still using the Network Licensing Model, so they still did not even realize that this potential problem is coming up. In most cases the Headless Inventor is running on a virtual machine that has no keyboard, no mouse, no user, no graphic card and no screen, as it is 100% automated.

Now that the Network Licensing Model has been discontinued and the UserID licensing is the way to go, there are high probabilities that, when Inventor is started on such a machine, this blank authentication window will come up:

 Autodesk Blank Sign In Dialog

This behavior is also officially documented in the AKN over here:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Blank-...

Unfortunately in the specific case of a real Headless Inventor setup, the steps described in the AKN article could fail to address the issue, as there is neither graphic card, nor a monitor to plug in.

Therefore a proper licensing mechanism for an Headless Inventor would be required

[freesbee]

2 - Over Expensive Licensing

One Vault license entitles the user to start up to 3 Inventor Headless instances. In the example here below I am running 10 headless inventors, in order to be able to process about 750k inventor documents in a reasonable time.

 batch processing documents with 10 headless inventors

This means that I simply wait that designers leave for the weekend, and I start my processing, because in this case 10 full inventor licenses are being used.

I would gladly pay 3 vault licenses if this would entitle me to fire up 9 Headless Inventors, as then I would be independent from the schedule of the design team, and I could perform such operations without having to wait that people have gone for the weekend. Moreover 3 Vault licenses are much much cheaper than 9 Inventor licenses.

Autodesk would sell some additional "Headless Inventor" licenses, and I would happily batch process my documents whenever I need.

[freesbee]

3 - Automated Neutral Formats Creation

In specific situations and depending on the company document lifecycle, certain documents need to be processed on specific events. For instance, when a drawing is superseded or retired, ISO7200 mandates that the corresponding field in the drawing titleblock showing the document status is also updated to the current value. In addition to this, all those neutral formats that are derived from the inventor drawing, also shall be updated to the correct value: this applies to PDF, TIFFs, DWGs, DXFs and whatever is derived from the inventor Drawing.

This can be successfully achieved either with infinite employees patience and capacity, or with a Headless Inventor, that takes care of updating all relevant documents on the corresponding event.

 an Headless Inventor taking care of neutral formats creation

Therefore the typical Inventor implementation doing this task normally runs as a service on some virtual machine, with no user, no GUI, no keyboard, no mouse, no graphic card, no screen.

As soon as the licensing issue described above (1 - Pure Licensing Issue) will kick in, this service will be broken, and it will take a while and a certain capacity of multiple admins to figure out what is gong wrong (it has happened in reality more than once).

This is one more reason why a more solid licensing & support model for Headless Inventor implementations is needed.