Settings for duplicate search

[grzjoh18]

Hello, please improve duplicate search in Inventor. Not all parts are really 100% equal, some of them to have a chamfer or a shaft to have a center hole which can not be found by this search right now. Would be great to get some of those improvements in future.

Idea for tolerance settings for duplicate search:

-Dimension search settings (exact or percentage of the model) 

-Searchable custom properties

-Optional settings/filter “linked to item” and/or “drawing exist”

-Filter acc. material

[DRoam]

As I understand it, the purpose of the duplicate search is to find parts that ARE 100% equal, so that companies can consolidate those into a single Part file and Part Number. If two parts have any differences, however small, then they could not have the same Part Number, so they are not "duplicates".

If you're wanting to find parts that are "similar" in order to quickly find a particular part, that's reasonable, but that's not the same as searching for "duplicates" in order to consolidate them. That wouldn't be an improvement to the "duplicate" search, that would be a different tool altogether.

It would help if you could clarify your other bullet points a bit more, but the last three sound like totally different search tools from "duplicate search" as well. I would create a dedicated idea for each of them.

[RStancescu]

@grzjoh18 In 2022, Duplicate tool works as you wish, will detect parts that aren't identical and tag them as identical. Unfortunately, that doesnt work for my company, I need to find 100% duplicates when I run the command. The search is comparing parts based on properties and not geometries. If I have two parts almost identical, one with a small hole in it, they will be tagged as identical. 

[NiekSmitsICN]

In Duplicate search of Vault/Inventor 2023 there is the option "Exact Match" to allow results that have minor differences (a few tenths of a millimeter, it seems). This improvement could be an solution for @grzjoh18, but I think a solution as I will describe further down could be even nicer.

The "Exact Match" option gives you a bit of space for minor errors or so, and that is great. So if your concern is to find exact (or near exact) duplicates, perfect. But what I see a lot in manufacturing companies is that in the engineering process, they need to develop a part, but what the exact end result should look like is not defined on forehand. What they want to do is opening an existing part (or even quickly draw an sample part that meets the target shape and size), and search the database for anything that comes close to that. Compare the functionality to Google Image search (images.google.com).

For example, the part with the hole in "search_fail_02.jpg" in the original post of @grzjoh18 could be an acceptable part to use in your assembly, even if you don't need the extra hole. If the alternative is to re-draw the complete part which could be more costly than accepting the extra drilled hole in the produced part.

The solution we could think of (I saw it in different software), could be an (optional?) result list of parts which not completely match the searched geometry, ranked with an percentage. For example the previousely mentioned shaft-part with the hole, could be a result in the result-list with an match-percentage of 85 percent.

Geometric search match list example (based on the shaft part mentioned above):

Result 1 (100%): An exact match of the part

Result 2 (85%): 'Exact' matching part with an extra hole

Result 3 (80%): 'Exact' matching part without chamfers

Result 4 (50%): Some other part that meets the outer diamter and length.

Etc.

[Ideagenerator]

It would also be helpful to select match percentages for individual features like:

Hole diameter: 100%

Distance between two holes: 80%

and so on.