Auto-load custom add-in at first inventor startup

[Venkatraj_GMHKXS6]

I have a custom addin dll placed in '%appdata%\Roaming\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins'. Now how do I load automatically during first start up. Many articles suggests that I put this dll in Administrative location and control it through AddinLoadRules.xml in %programfiles%\Autodesk\Inventor2026\Preferences.

But the requirement I have is that these dlls are distributed to all my users using Vault. So i need to put it in a location that does not need admin rights to write. I need to put it here %appdata%\Roaming\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins

[cwe89]

Hello,

as far as I know, all unsigned add-ins are blocked by default. The user must unblock them manually, after which they will load automatically every time the program starts.

[bhavani_sankuratri]

Hi @Venkatraj_GMHKXS6,

Hope you are doing good! Did the response provided by cwe89 answer your question? If so, could you please mark the post as the accepted solution? This will help other community members who may have the same question in the future.

[kristian_oa]

By default, Inventor blocks add-ins that are not signed. However, when a new add-in is detected, it should pop-up with a dialog prompting the user that the new add-in was detected and to go to the add-in manager to enable (unblock) it.

I personally have always put my add-ins in "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Autodesk\Inventor Addins", as I don't think it requires admin rights to save to (or at the very least it never asks me to, but that could be a group policy setting or something on my PC).

To distribute my add-in across computers, I created an installer using NSIS, but this may not be the best solution in your case. While I have not extensively used Vault (I am trying to get it set up with all of our files which are across thousands of folders and multiple computers...), I believe files that Vault downloads are located in a specific folder that Vault sets up, and setting it to any of the add-in locations that Inventor reads is not advisable.

Another solution is to have a script that runs on each computer that copies your add-in's dll's to the desired location.

[cwe89]

The .dll file can also be located on a network path in order to access it. Only the .addin file must be located on the local PC and contain the correct path to the .dll file.