Which way to go, Attaching parts to Skeleton through API

[dhanna]

Good morning;

                I've been putting together a somewhat ambitious program in Inventor VBA. So far, I have pieced together some code to get the user interaction, name of files to get data from, save location of output files. Open Excel, grab that data, put that data into a dictionary of custom class objects, Open an Autocad drawing, analyze relevant blocks which the excel stores a bulk of the information needed. Dump analysis into another excel with a table of formulas to calculate the start and stop points of sketch lines to be the skeletons of framing and facade. I have prior coding to create mark numbers and storing the relevant data to apply features to parts. I even did some experiments with help from this board to constrain parts to sketch lines.

So my question is, which way to go..

First guess is to use proxies between the skeleton part sketch line end points to position part and then ground it. Use either reference keys or attributes to reference the original sketch line for position and length and update through another script.

Second guess is to project geometry of sketch line and use as a  "path" for an extrusion of each profile.

Last guess, load part through content center or by adding from component definition / occurrence, and apply constraints. 

I am certainly open to more elegant solutions, and any hints or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you for your time;

Duane.

[dhanna]

so, I've completed the piece of code that creates the part file that contains the sketches to use as skeleton.

I've been trying to figure out hove to fix the content center structural members to the line work and have it update accordingly as seen when using frame generator. 

I figured out and found, that the frame reference model contains a 3d sketch with for lines it uses 3d sketchline with electric the start and endpoints coincident with the endpoints of the skeleton sketchline. This is, I  believe to isolate the original sketch.

I am familiar with placing content center parts, though I haven't figured out to force the part to keep its relationship to the 3d sketchline and tie the driven length to the length of the 3d sketchline, other than linking the parameters yet the 3d sketchline doesn't have a parameter. 

I have been exploring the idea of placing workplanes at the endpoints and then place a sketchblock at the start plane and extrude to the end plane.

Is there someplace I can look for insight or is there a better methodology?

Thanks

[dhanna]

Here is an example of the aforementioned part file with the line work to be used as the skeleton in the next phase. At this point an end user could simply use FG to populate the frame. Since there is almost 200 different frames each with 16 to 60 extrusions on them and 1 to about 80 copies of each frame within the master assembly, I would really appreciate any suggestions or guidance.

Thank you