When we create a plant layout in Inventor (or any other large assembly) we often struggle to check that new top-level assembly into Vault due to it having what Inventor sees as an unsaved change or “dirty” file. This caries on after the initial check in with every subsequent check in making it very frustrating to check it in later. Most of the time the files that Inventor sees as "dirty" are because they are sub-assemblies with flexible positional representations, these assemblies are also in a released state so we couldn't check them out to save them anyway.
This causes our team working with very large layouts a lot of headaches. Most of the time that team will only have the very top-level assembly checked out as that is the only file that they need to edit. For initial check in we have been forced to check in an empty assembly with the name we want and then saving over the top of that so we can fool Vault to let us check it in. For subsequent check-ins we have been getting around this partially by either saving the files out of turn or saving only the top level that is checked out and then closing the assembly so we get the prompt to check in on close. This works most of the time (80%) but when it takes up to 30 minutes to open an assembly to just close it again to check it in, we lose large amounts of productive time! This also doesn't work if you have other assemblies open and just want to update the layout in the Vault.
We need a way of being able to check in just that assembly regardless of the state that Inventor thinks its children are in. If all the child files are the latest version in the Vault I can’t see why this isn’t possible.