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Before releasing the new Copy Design, we gathered a little feedback from Inventor users and arrived at the conclusion that most of these Copy Design users are primarily worried about the 3D model and a little less concerned when it comes to the design documentation configuration.
Don't get us wrong, we know one of the main benefits to copying an existing design is providing a completely new model with documentation ready to go pending your design tweaks, which is why we provide a new simplified view of the copy design that is going to, by default, copy and rename your drawings to match the models.
We called this the Model View.
For those of you though who are a little more curious about the fate of your design documentation, we allow you to switch this default Model View to "Drawing View", enabling users to see all the attached drawings as top level objects in Copy Design, along with their current actions and new file names.
If you have the default settings configured, the drawings will be set to "Link Drawings to Models", meaning when we switch to Drawing View (as in the video below) all your drawing files will be set to "Automatic". What does this mean though?
Automatic means the design documentation (dwg, idw and ipn files) will take the same name as the primary model dependency (the first model detailed in the drawing or presentation file and being copied) and will be copied to the same location as the primary model dependency, if this is what you want, you can probably switch back to model view right now, but if you like the more cluttered main grid view or want to change either the drawing file name or the drawing file location this is where you do it.
As you see in the video, by changing the drawing file to "Copy" (Or selecting "Copy To"), we can set a new file location and a new file name independent of the model. Change your mind? Not a problem, while the link model and drawing option is selected we can Reuse the design documentation and it will revert to Auto. In the video you can see the file names and location change accordingly.
Now when you disable the link between model and drawings you will see the drawings revert to Edit status and you will essentially be linking a new model to this drawing – be careful – this is why we made Edit "Red", it's not usually what you want to do.
You may also wonder here what the difference between Automatically Copy Parents and Link Drawings and Model is. If you disable link drawing and model, but maintain the automatically copy parents option your drawings will automatically be set to copy with the models, but of course have separate file names and locations, meaning it's quite different to Auto but a good way to ensure you don't accidentally edit drawings.
If you decide you don't want or need drawings for the copied models you can set the file to Exclude (see my post on Exclude for more details there) and it will simply be ignored, you'll get a model with no drawing.
In the video example I set everything back to Auto to ensure the file names and save locations are consistent and I can then execute to create the new models with their associates ipn and idw files. Obviously given this result, the simpler approach is to just stay in model view and have the all this happen in the background, but life isn't always that simple and drawing view gives us full access to all files and complete flexibility to set our drawing details when the need arises.
– Allan
