Using positional representations and VBA to replace .ipns?

[William.asplin]

I appreciate there will be a lot of text below, but this is less a specific VBA error question and more a question about exploring possibilities.

We currently use presentations and tweaks with the tweak lines to create in-depth instruction manuals for our production team. The workflow however is quite labour intensive and, although we have macros for some of the more tedious aspects of creating the documentation, accessing certain properties from an .ipn snapshot view seems impossible.

For example, we have an assembly step with a few parts in a larger assembly, only the neccessary parts are visible in the snapshot. We have a macro that automatically balloons the parts, and creates a table with most of the required information. We can't however seem to find a good way to get the required quantities of parts in that assembly step.

Our current macro involves clicking on all the parts that we want in the table, and it counts the number of each different part that was clicked and uses that as the quantity. Ideally the macro would get the visibility status in the snapshot from the view and count those, removing the manual/human aspect, but we can't seem to find how to access this property or similar through views of .ipn snapshots.

I have been exploring using positional representations to replace the need for .ipns in our use case completely. This allows us easy access to all of the model properties and what constraints/parts are overwritten/visible. The only issue I am having is a replacement for the tweak lines and have come across a few failed methods.

1. Sketching the lines in the assembly as a separate part, then bringing the sketches through to the drawing. This would be great if I could make a 3d sketch directly in the assembly, but I either need to create lots of work planes, or create new part files just for the tweak lines. When I pull the sketches through to the drawing they are always on top, which I can't seem to change.

2. Creating a sketch in the drawing comprising of the tweaks between the different parts. This is promising however, I don't know how to go from the 2 3D points at the centre of the overridden inserts, to a 2D line in the drawing. I also fear that this would have the same problem as above where the sketch is always above the view.

The ideal scenario, would be to be able add tweak lines when I override the constraints in the assembly. Following that, creating the lines in the positional representation.

What I want to know is whether there is a workflow that I can use so that as a company we can skip the .ipn stage in creating assembly manuals. I appreciate that what I'm asking may be impossible. If this question is in the wrong place then I will happily post it wherever it should be instead.