Category: Mod The Machine

A new plug-in of the month has just been posted at Autodesk Labs.  This one is called Feature Migrator for Inventor.  What it does is transfer assembly features down into the parts they affect. Philippe Leefsma, one of the engineers that supports members of the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) wrote this one.  Philippe has put…

I’ve found it beneficial to time how long it takes portions of my programs to run and in particular when a program takes longer to run than I initially expected.  Timing the different portions of a program tells you where the program is taking the most time and sometimes will help you find issues with…

In my previous post I described how to access thumbnail images in Inventor documents.  At the bottom of that post is a link to an updated version of a component that provides access to thumbnails.  A problem has been reported since I posted that code and has now been fixed.  It’s likely that most of…

I’ve had a few recent posts that have talked briefly about using thumbnail images (Document Thumbnails and Button Icons, Parts List with Thumbnail Image, and Accessing iProperties).  If you need to get a thumbnail image from an Inventor document there are several possibilities.  I want to briefly cover those here. Thumbnail as an iProperty The…

Here’s some more functionality I’ve discovered in the .Net Framework that makes it hard for me when I have use VBA.  In a recent post I talked about the functionality to manipulate full paths that’s supported by the Path class of the System.IO namespace.  Two other very useful classes supported by System.IO are Directory and…

You don’t know anything about VBA but you’ve found some interesting VBA code somewhere on the web, in a newsgroup, or maybe even here.  So now what do you do with that code to be able to use it in Inventor?  Here are the cookbook steps: From within Inventor, press Alt-F11 or run the VBA…

It’s common to need to manipulate filenames within a program.  When using VBA there’s very little built-in functionality to help with this.  When using VB.Net I had assumed I needed to do the same thing there that I had been doing in VBA.  It wasn’t until fairly recently that I discovered a set of utilities…

In all previous iProperty related posts I’ve only talked about working with the four public property sets; Design Tracking, Summary Info, Document Summary Info, and User Defined.  The first three of these contain a fixed number of properties while the user defined allows you to add and delete your own properties.  This mirrors the iProperty…

  The previous post on working with custom iProperties shows how to create iProperties of various types, including dates.  However, dates have one unique behavior, as shown below.  There is a check box next to each date property, (circled in the picture below), that the user can check or uncheck to indicate if they want…

In the iProperties dialog, Inventor allows you to create expressions for the values of iProperties.  Using an expression you can combine the values of other iProperties into a single iProperty value.  (By using the functionality described in a previous post to create an iProperty for a parameter, you can also use parameter values in an…