Working with iParts and Autodesk Vault

Today’s post will cover working with iParts in Inventor and Vault. Previously, we examined the Document Management settings within Vault to Categorize, Lifecycle, and Revise Configuration Members. All those effort were towards securing iParts and preventing the unnecessary save/checkout/checkin/save issues that challenges users. We’re building up to a series of best practices to work with Configurations, and now it’s time to discuss working with iParts from within Autodesk Inventor.

Now that you have the foundation in Vault, we’ll outline different directions you can take for using new iParts with Vault. The first use case will be an iPart with a handful of members in the table. One option, depending on the number of members, is to mass-generate all members and check them into Vault, this is the first scenario we’re going to discuss. For sample purposes, I am using the Flywheel iPart from the Engine sample that comes with Inventor. I took the liberty of creating a number of additional Member based off of the hole count parameter. These are listed in the Inventor Model browser, after the table is expanded. If you Shift-select the members, you can right click and select Generate Files. This will create a subfolder and place one of each member within.

Now that the members are created, switch over to the Vault browser and check in the Factory.

Here’s the best part – you don’t have to track down each member file and check it in. Simply selecting the Factory after you generate all members will add them to the check in operation.

Following the category rules and lifecycle definitions, the iPart members are checked in, categorized, and immediately released.

The final step to securing the iPart members is to Release the Factory. Now the iParts are ready for placement within an assembly.

Next time, a look at placing iPart members individually instead of mass- generating them before hand.

-Brian Schanen