Editing Inventor iProperties with Vault

Posted September 1, 2008

by Community Admin1

Could iProperty Management be Easier?

In the world of design, information is conveyed in several ways. Drawings, 3D models, and tables are all used to convey the designer’s intent. Components used in a design contain more than just geometric information. Text-based information called Properties can be assigned to components to provide further definition.

Properties describe a particular feature of a component. Properties such as Part Number, Name, Project Name or Revision Level are assigned to each component within a design. These properties may be unique to each component, or common to all components. Drawings of the components can display these properties in Notes, or in the Title block. When all these properties are combined, they form a Bill of Materials for the assembly.

Autodesk® Inventor® provides many ways to populate or manage component properties. In Inventor, Properties are referred to as iProperties. One very efficient method leverages the Vault. Using this workflow, it is very simple to populate multiple iProperties in multiple components en masse.

The Setup

Imagine that you have completed the design of a new product. During the design phase, each component was saved as its part number with the Description iProperty populated. Now that the design is complete, it is time to create a Bill of Materials and drawings.

Making use of the Vault, it is easy to populate all the common properties. Let’s look at the steps you would take to accomplish this task.

1. With your design ready to document, check the entire dataset into the Vault. If the files haven’t been added to the Vault, do that now.

2. Once everything is checked in, use the Vault Explorer to browse to the assembly file. You can select the file and choose Edit Properties from the Context Menu. This will start the Edit Properties Wizard.

3. At this point, with the Edit Properties Wizard Active, it is possible to add files from different locations in the Vault using the Add Files tool. Add all of the files that you would like to work with.

4. The next part of the Wizard takes us to the Editing dialog. It is here where the iProperty edits are made. This grid behaves similar to common spreadsheet programs when it comes to copying, pasting, etc.

5. The first iProperty we will populate is the Revision property. All components in this design are at Revision A at this point. Enter “A” in the Revision column beside the first part number. The remainder of the components can be updated by selecting the recently entered property, in this case “A”, and dragging it down the column. Populate the Revision, Author, and Comments columns in the same way with values of your choosing.

6. With the Revision, Author, and Comments properties populated, we can proceed with filling in the Project property. The Project iProperty is the same for all components in this case. In addition, the Title Property of the top level assembly matches the Project property.

7. The next step is where this iProperties workflow really shines. When this assembly was created some of the components were named incorrectly. They contain part of the title in the description field. Select these properties and copy / paste them into a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. In this case, they are the 3 that contain Switch.

8. Once your properties are in Microsoft Excel, they can be manipulated using the program functions. In this case use the Text to Columns tool to split the properties.

9. Once the properties are split, copy and paste the values on the right back in the Edit Properties tool where they originated.

10. The next step is to go through and populate the Title column with the assembly names.

11. In our example, we have a mixture of upper and lower case. This is easy to correct. It is as simple as selecting all the cells, and picking Capitalize from the Context Menu.

12. The iProperties are now populated correctly. Complete the process by clicking Finish. A report is displayed listing the results.

13. Manipulating the components within the Vault has caused the files in our working folder to be out of date. To refresh the working folder, perform a Get Latest on the top level assembly. The components are now ready for documentation. In addition, the BOM is complete.

The Conclusion

Editing iProperties can be a time consuming endeavor. Using this workflow makes it much simpler by providing the means to: edit Properties simultaneously in tabular format; apply Microsoft Excel functions to iProperties, thereby creating complex values easily; and resolve mixed case issues at the click of a button.

Using the Property Editor in Vault Explorer provides consistent property population, permitting you to spend less time typing, and allowing you to dedicate your valuable time to designing  and documenting your product.

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