Assign Items for iPart / iAssembly Member Drawings

[alex.bahl]

Greetings,

We don't usually create drawings for iParts, but on the occasion we do we have the same issue. But specifically with iAssemblies since we need to have detail drawings of those; we create the Factory for all of the possible Members and then make drawings for the individual Members as we need them.

The issue we're having is when we go to Assign / Update Item in Vault on these iAssembly Members it will want to attach the every drawing created for all the Members in the Factory. This leads to unrelated drawings being attached to an Item and I suppose could cause some confusion if someone pulled a drawing out of Item Master and didn't pay attention to the part number on the drawing. It's up to the designers to go through the Item, right-click and remove the extraneous drawings after updating the Item, but sometimes that get's missed. Just wondering if anyone else has seen this problem and if there is a solution.

Thanks,
Alex
 

Vault Pro 2015

[Ron_Jones1122]

When these drawings were created do they reference any of the other members in the iFactory?

Have you considered making a master drawing for the entire factory and using some iLogic to scale/move the view depending on what's changed?

[alex.bahl]

The drawings use the Parent iPart / iAssembly to place the drawing views and then the Member is selecting from the Model State tab on the Drawing View window. In the case of iAssemblies, the Part List is referencing the Member in the drawing view.

Our process for drawing creation has been to use Copy Design on an existing member drawing from Vault and change the Member reference. Could you tell me more about making a master drawing?

Thanks for looking at this,

Alex

[Anonymous]

Hi!

Having exactly the same issue with multiple drawings attached to same Item. It seems that if you create a table or Parts List on the member drawing you get this issue. If you don't do that only the member drawing is attached. At least I can see that behaviour.

[Cody.Redding]

Anyone found a workaround or fix for this?  Currently removing 15 drawings from 16 different parts.  

It does seem to be related to the parts list, or at least iAssemblies, not iParts.  It is only doing this on my iAssemblies, which have parts lists in the drawings, not the parts, which do not have the lists.

[alain_miltenburg · Accepted solution]

Heya, First of all; I have a solution for this issue. Its in the last line of this post. But first some blabla:

I found this topic while I was looking for a problem we encountered related to drawings of iParts and Vault Items.

I understand the validity of your workflow, where you make drawings for every iFactory member. There is no discussion this should be supported by the Item Master.

Another way to document iFactories is by using one generic drawing per iFactory. This is our current workflow. So you can imagine what you are experiencing for iAssemblies as a problem, is a blessing for us. 😉

However, we had a problem with iParts. The generic drawing for the iPart family got assigned to just one of the Items, namely the Member configured in the Model State tab of the drawing. We had to attach the drawing to the remainder items by hand.

I just found out this behavior can be changed by setting the Member in the Model State tab to "Active Member" (See the picture below). After updating your items, all items will have a drawing linked.

The reason for this is when you set it to one of the members, you actually change to drawing views to one of the member files. When you set it to "Active Member", you are viewing the actual factory. Watch your Vault tree in Inventor to review this behavior, while changing the Member views.

Note that dimensions will be lost and/or broken when changing to Active Factory Member. (Shame on you Autodesk; for using Derived Components for iPart Members..........)

Back to your issue; For iAssemblies the above mentioned procedure does not work.

Mattias pointed me in the right direction. While watching the Vault tree in Inventor I noticed the following. Drawing views always have a reference to the Member Files. Which explains that drawing without balloons get linked to just one item. When adding a balloon or part list, a reference is made to the factory. Because of this, all member items get a link to the drawing.

The solution is simple; just replace the Model Reference to the iFactory with one to the member. Update your items and smile!