Appearances Attributes in the Library

[ajcampbell]

Is it possible to save an attribute to an appearance then save it to a library? I would like to store some finish data that can be accessed later from the api. I can apply the attribute to all the necessary renderstlyes and use the SaveToGlobal() method. It seems to work great in the part the program is run from, but when I go to the next part and apply the same appearance it does not contain the new attribute. I have also tried creating a copy of the appearance in the document then save that to the library, but any appearances that I edit or create programmatically will not save to the library even if manually drag it within the appearance editor. My project show the material and appearance libraries set to read/write and if I create an appearance thought the editor I can move it to the library without any problems, it's only the items created/modified through the api that will not move. I am running Inventor 2013 SP2. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Andy

[ajcampbell]

As an update I did find the new appearances that, they were being added to the Inventor Material library. However when I apply these to a part in a new document there are still no attributes on the renderstyle.

[adam.nagy · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I don't think it can be done. Inventor 2013 (like many other products) moved to using a common material/appearence library that's using assets.

When Inventor pushes the Material object into the library I don't think it can store the attributes on that object - even the API wrapper of an Asset in Inventor 2014 does not provide the ability to store attributes on it.

So basically once the information is moved to the library the attibutes are lost there.
The ability of storing attributes on an asset could be a future enhancement.

Cheers,