I have been migrating from Inventor 2021 to 2023. Therefore I have been playing around with model states for the last few weeks. I found 3 features (??) that can lead to unexpected results that I wanted to share.
"The transaction functionality is the means by which Inventor keeps track of the timeline of changes made during the course of an Inventor session. Transactions allow the user to perform Undo and Redo operations in Inventor." (Autodesk Inventor help) It's possible to create your own transaction. With those transactions, we can write more robust (and faster) rules.
Just the other day someone on the "Inventor iLogic and VB.net Forum" asked if it's possible to stop a long-running iLogic rule. I guess, in some cases, you want to allow your users to stop an iLogic rule. Out of the box, this is not possible, but there are some functions in the Inventor API that make it possible.
While selecting dimensions is possible with the easy to use command "ThisApplication.CommandManager.Pick(Filter As SelectionFilterEnum, PromptText As String)" it's impossible to distinguish between the dimension line and extension lines. That is precisely what was asked for in this post.
I think that many people have a hate-love relationship with the design doctor. Of course, you never want to see that red cross at the top of your screen. But stuff breaks and you need to know about it and solve it. This is where the design doctor should shine. It should help you identify all problems and help you to solve them.
I have now 3 rules on this site to automatically generate dimensions. (Overall dimensions, Hole position and Bend dimensions) At the moment I can't think of any more types of dimensions I can generate automatically. But there is something left that we can generate.
Writing a rule that will generate the dimensions for all bend lines in a sheet metal flat pattern drawing view is not easy. This is a rule that I wanted to write for a long time but did not manage to do till now. The problem is not finding the bend lines nor finding all contour lines. But the problem is how more finding a contour line that is parallel with a bend line and is also useful.
I came across this cool piece of code that draws a bounding box around any part in any orientation. I did improve it a bit but credits should go to the topic starter of this post "a dynamic box?".
Writing code means a lot of trial and error. Debugging involves figuring out what is happening (often that is not the same as what you think that is happening). The way to figure that out is by stopping the code at the point that everything fails and checking what your computer has in memory. When I started writing iLogic rules the only way I knew for debugging was to stop the code with a messagebox and display the content of a variable.
For a computer, a number is just that. Therefore we assign units to a parameter. But most Inventor API functions return values in internal database units. This can be confusing if you expect that all values are in the units of your document. It gets even more confusing when you have a parameter in another unit type... Let's have a look at those unit types and how to convert them to the units you need.
On the "Inventor iLogic, API & VBA Forum" forum, I see often people that use or even start learning VBA. In this post, I will try to explain why I think that is not a good idea. On the Microsoft site, you can read: “Visual Studio 2010 (VC++ 10.0) Service Pack 1 reached the end of extended support on July 14, 2020”. This is important because “Visual Basic for Applications” (VBA) depends on these Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable.
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