Mirrored Hole Note quantities

[JohnKHouston]

Hello all,

I often use the mirror feature in an assembly to drill holes on both sides of an object. When I detail the holes in a drawing, the hole note counts all the holes including the mirrored holes. This presents a problem using the <QTYNOTE> in the hole note. I tried to edit the quantity note to select the number of like holes in view, but it still displayed the QTYNOTE as the total sum of holes, not just the holes in the view.

I've often just manually added a note saying "(xx amt) PER SIDE", but that causes issues because now I have the automatically calculated number of holes and the manually entered number of holes. For example, my hole note would read like this when I have 24 holes in total but only 12 per side;

25/64 THRU

24X (12X PER SIDE)

Where both the diameter and the quantity note are using the generated values but I have to manually enter the '12X PER SIDE'

Obviously manually entering the 12X value isn't good because it could be missed if the hole quantity is ever changed. Are there any options that would allow me to divide the 24X and add that to my hole note, or have the program see the hole quantity properly in the number of like holes option?

Perhaps there's already some way of correcting this issue? I suppose I could not use the mirror command but I'm lazy sometimes!  🙂

Any and all suggestions appreciated, have a great day!

Regards,

John

[nxy6Y2JN]

Thank you. We are facing the same problem for years. Mirror feature is vital when we are designing symmetric parts which are containing hole features, and we want to just mirror the half part. On the drawings we cannot have the correct number of holes per side. In case that we use GD&T and the planes from one side to another they use different letters we cannot have the correct quantities related to the planes reference. Except from that we should do the holes separately for each side of the part to counted as different features and therefore the mirror function is useless.

[bulrich-finn]

This would be very useful for us as well. This makes for inaccurate hole counts on parts where hole patterns are mirrored to both sides. Due to GD&T datums, we can't just call them all out at once (and, GD&T aside, it would make for a less-readable drawing).

Does anyone have a solution for this that doesn't involve either manually putting a quantity into the note (which is obviously bad and prone to errors), or manually re-creating the holes on the opposite side (which seems like a waste of time — it's 2025 after all, I shouldn't have to manually draw duplicate things over and over).

[WCrihfield]

Hi @bulrich-finn.  You could post something like this in the Inventor Ideas board, but I doubt it would get many votes.  I (and likely the majority of others) would not want the hole quantity to work the way you and the previous poster's here have requested, but I do not disregard that some might like it that way.  If Inventor was to do something about it, it should definitely be an 'Option' that can be turned On/Off, rather than something that effects everyone the same way.  I count it a blessing that mirroring holes adds to the total quantity, because that is my intent, since all the holes are exactly the same, and usually all on the same part.  It is very convenient just putting one hole note to cover them all, without having to manually override the total quantity to include the ones that were mirrored.  So, I would suggest a checkbox type control, maybe in multiple places, such as within the dialog for mirroring, which can be used to instruct Inventor to include/exclude the mirrored features in a total quantity.  And if not at the point of creating the mirrored features, then maybe there could be a setting/option for it somewhere within the 'DimensionStyle' settings which the HoleThreadNote uses, that way every HoleThreadNote you place using that Style will show the quantity the way you want, due to that setting.

Anyways, as for what can be done right now...

I don't know how much you may know about iLogic or automating Inventor by code through the Inventor API, but there may be a way to help make the needed changes automatically going that route.  For example, if you have a drawing visibly open on your screen, then look in the iLogic Event Triggers dialog, on the 'This Document' tab, you will see an event listed there named "Drawing View Change".  That event gets triggered when the model gets changed, and updated, in a way that causes the view in the drawing to update, and when the drawing view updates due to that cause, that event is fired.  An iLogic rule can be placed under that event, within that dialog, then that rule would run every time that event happened for that document.  So, you can create an external iLogic rule which can attempt to get the drawing document which the event happened in, then iterate through all of those HoleThreadNote objects in that drawing, checking quantities, and checking if the source feature has been mirrored.  If so, and there is a 'static text' within that note for the 'override quantity', you can edit that override quantity within that note.  This is all just an idea at this point, and I have never seen a code exactly like that before, so not sure how difficult it would be to develop.  Most likely, the most difficult part of that whole thing would be trying to determine whether or not the total quantity of holes that the hole note represents includes a mirror feature.  Then trying to find and fix that static text in the note by code likely would not be that simple either.  So, not sure if it would be worth while to invest that much time & effort into attempting to develop something like that.