iLogic in iPart Factory; is it possible/recommended?

[Anonymous]

Hi!

Is it safe to utilise iLogic rules in an iPart Factory.

Has anyone did that before and got a robust, stable part (or not)?

Reactions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Yves

[MjDeck]

No, it's not safe to use iLogic rules in an iPart factory.  In Inventor 2011, you can't create or edit rules in an iPart factory.

Rules will run when you're editing the factory.  But after you place a member part in an assembly, the rules will not run when you change the member.  The member is derived from the assembly, and the derivation is entirely controlled by the iPart table.  The rules don't affect the member part.

[Anonymous]

Mike, thanks for you answer. 

My concern is that, so far, I have used VBA functions in iPart factory to send the result of an evaluation of some sort to a cell (parameter) of the factory's table. This function would compute and update the parameters of a member row as this member part is being created. But now, since our switch to 64 bits work stations and the use of Inventor 2010 and earlier, we have faced serious issues running our application level, VBA projects.

As we are now beginning a new product development with Inventor 2011, we have decided not to use VBA any more to the benefit of .NET language.

A first question: how can replace the VBA in iParts factory, when the need of such logic test, as described above, per exemple, is encountered?

A second question: Would it be safe to still use VBA functions in model parts, knowing that Microsoft does not support that language anymore, and that Autodesk could decide not to make it available in any future release of Inventor?

[MjDeck]

Autodesk plans to support VBA in future versions of Inventor.

Are you using VBA functions in equations (in the Parameters dialog), to calculate values of some parameters based on the values of others?  Is that your only use of VBA in the iPart factories?

[Anonymous]

Mike,

In iParts factories, I am using VBA functions in equations in the Parameters dialog, as well as in the tables of those iPart factories; as shown in the attached screen capture. The purpose is effectively to calculate values based on the values of parameters.