I need to report Area in upchain from custom iProperty in inventor is this impossible?

[wbarnardGTEV5]

So I have a custom Iproperty that reports flat area for sheet metal / plate parts. this is critical information.

I cannot map this to an attribute "Area" in Upchain because:

I cant add it to Upchain, as Upchain tells me the Attribute " Area" already exists. 

The attribute "Area"  doesn't show up in a search of common attributes etc., so there is no way to select it and map it to the correct iProperty?

I don't want to create a new Custom Attribute for this because I can't control where the new column will land when exporting the Ebom into excel, which messes up all of our post processing software, which uses many VLOOKUP's etc.  "Area" is already a Column, and it reports NOTHING.  so, it's not really already mapped. 

[emily.caulfield · Accepted solution]

Hi @wbarnardGTEV5 thank you for your question. The reason you can't add a custom attribute named 'Area' is because it already exists as a File Attribute. I've attached an image of where you can find this value in an item. I'm still waiting to hear back about how this value is filled in and I'll let you know when I have a response.

[emily.caulfield · Accepted solution]

Hi @wbarnardGTEV5 , there is a tenant property called "extract.cad.properties" and this is what reads a number of the physical properties from the CAD file and writes it to the item details tab > CAD Attributes > CAD Attributes section. See images below. The Area iProperty is written to the SurfaceArea attribute in Upchain.

 

It looks like the File Attributes are not filled out at all and I don't believe they are used anymore. As for the custom iProperty, there is no way to map it specifically to these CAD Attributes, so your options would be to take advantage of the CAD Attributes, or create a custom item attribute with a name that's not Area or SurfaceArea. Hope that helps.

[wbarnardGTEV5]

notice at the top, directly below the heading File Attributes, "Area" is blank. and there is no way to map to this attribute. 

[wbarnardGTEV5]

our intent is to report the area of flat parts, " surface area" is calculated in inventor as the total 3 dimensional surface area.  we have rule that can pull the 2 dimensional surface area of just a flat pattern, for a laser. see OP for reason why we dont want to add another custom field to upchain if possible.

[emily.caulfield]

@wbarnardGTEV5 you can submit an idea to the Upchain Ideas Board about using the File Attributes or removing them altogether to free up the "Area" attribute. In the meantime, you can either use the Surface Area attribute or create your own custom attribute in Upchain.