Deleting Materials

[Anonymous]

I only need 4 materials. Steel, Mild, Stainless Steel, UHMW, and AR. How
can I modify inventor to have only these materials so I don't have to
constantly sift through 100 different materials?

I tried deleting them out of the materials.xml file, but it didn't seem to
have an effect on inventor.

[Anonymous]

Styles (including materials) can exist in two locations; the library and
locally within a document. Removing unwanted styles from the xml file
removes them from the library but not for any documents they might exist in.
Typically the local styles are ones that have been used from the library and
are copied locally so the document will behave correctly even when used
somewhere where that style doesn't exist. It looks like there are a lot of
local materials in the standard part template. I don't know why.

Here's a program that will delete (or purge as it's referred to in the
user-interface) all local materials that aren't being used for the active
document. If you do this for the template then all of your parts will be
clean and you can still used materials from the library.

Public Sub PurgeLocalMaterials()
Dim oDoc As PartDocument
Set oDoc = ThisApplication.ActiveDocument

Dim oMaterial As Material
For Each oMaterial In oDoc.Materials
If oMaterial.StyleLocation = kLocalStyleLocation And Not
oMaterial.InUse Then
oMaterial.Delete
End If
Next
End Sub
--
Brian Ekins
Autodesk Inventor API