Being inventive with parts lists?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm trying to make a painful job in my company into a clickclick and done job. And I'm almost there, but there is one thing missing.

We are a company that makes large process columns, silo's and pressure tanks. We used to do this in autocad but recently (partially) switched to Inventor.

When the engineering of a tank and vessel is done, there is always a list to be made of all the items that need to be burned from plate. Basically all plates that need programming.

In Autocad this basically is going trough all the plans and writing down the material, thickness and size. Now using inventor we can access the parts only list which is a step forward.

What I did is the following: I made a custom property 'code' just for sorting reasons. So people can mark all parts they want with a specific code and put them together.

Then It's just turning all parts without the right code to invisible. (this I want to automate)

After all is unneeded parts are invisible I sort the file using this rule.

Dim oDrawDoc As DrawingDocument
oDrawDoc = ThisApplication.ActiveDocument

Dim oPartsList1 As PartsList
oPartsList1 = oDrawDoc.ActiveSheet.PartsLists.Item(1)
oPartsList1.Sort("Material", 1, "Thickness", 1, "Description", 1)

What I would like to add in this rule is a step in front of the sorting that:

- Turns all parts without the right code to turned invisible. So there is no more browsing true the list.

Can someone help me with this? It would help me alot, and would make it possible to make more lists like this 🙂

Thanks.