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In The Machine is the official blog of the Inventor Product Management Team. It is a way for us to share Inventor news, interesting information about successful Inventor customers and partners as well as tips and tricks. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Garin Gardiner our Technical Marketing Manager.
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What About Those Fractions?
April 21, 2008, 02:10 PM Garin Gardiner
For those of you that need to display fractions in your parts list, here is a new little nugget that I ran across that was added in Inventor 2009. I was working with a company that makes wood furniture and as you can imagine, they wanted to have a parts list with all the lengths, widths and thickness of each piece of lumber displayed as fraction instead of decimal and make sure they would automatically update as part lengths changed.
To do this I created a few parameters for length, width and thickness and marked them as exportable (making them exportable is critical to display them in the parts list).
Here is where the new option comes in to export as fractions. Right click on the Model Value and select "Custom Property Format..." to format how the parameter will be exported and used in the parts list. From here I selected Fraction instead of Decimal although if you want to use a different unit you can have it export something else as well as changing the precision.
This can open a lot of door for using one unit type for the part model although displaying something completely different in the parts list. To be able to pull this all over to the parts list you need format your part description to have the parameters you want. Open one of the parts and open iProperties from the File menu. From here I will input the parameters I want to display in the description and select apply to see the value update. If you need to make changes after you select apply, you can right click on the value and select "Edit Expression" in Inventor 2009.
Now you can create open your drawing and see that everything has been formatted in fractions in your parts list.
Hope there are a few of you out there that use fractions that this will help out.
Garin
1 Comment | Add Comment In the Machine > Inventor LT, Tips, Autodesk Inventor
Comments
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May 12, 2008 05:13 AM Arto Konttinen
Hi! When i use "Custom Property Format" in parameters-window(inv. 2009) the changes i have made goes back to default every time when the value of the parameter changes! Is this somekind of bug or is it supposed to work like that? What i want is to display values "120.00 deg" to "120°" Arto Konttinen (arto_konttinen@hotmail.com)
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