Controlling folder names and filenames

Setup your iPart following standard steps, which can be found here in the Inventor Help file.

Tip: Make sure you don’t use any special characters in the Member name or Filename columns within your iPart Table. It can create undesirable file naming problems, or errors appearing when switching between different iPart members.

Then rename the top browser node (highlighted above), type in the name of the folder you would like the iPart members to be saved to.

Just remember the Top Browser Node (Green Rectangle), ISN’T the filename. This is just a workaround to control the name of the folder the iPart Members get published/generated/saved to.

The actual file name can be found in the iProperties dialog if you need it, shown above.

The filename of your iPart members is controlled in the iPart table, by setting the column you want to become the filename. By default this is the Member name column, shown above.

Rule number 1, NEVER delete the iPart members from their folder once they are in use within designs or iAssemblies. You will break association and potentially cause yourself A LOT of rework.

Rule number 2, DON’T assume all the members are regenerated. I experienced far too many occasions where a number of the members haven’t regenerated, post factory edits, when I was expecting them to. I found a failsafe though, if you change the value of a property in the factory, they regenerate without fail every time.

While this guide focuses on first time creation, it’s important to build in stability for future edits you will almost certainly have to perform. For this reason, its good practice to test applying some changes to your factories and make sure they translate into your members as expected. An even more thorough test would be to have the first version of members constrained in an assembly. That way when you regenerate the members you will be able to see if constraint errors occur, and tend to them immediately rather than after the iPart Factory has gone into ‘production’.

• Create or Modify a custom iProperty called ‘Gen’
  as shown in the image above. This will force each iPart Member in the table to
  be regenerated.

• From the manage tab, Update the Mass, then
  Rebuild All. DON’T forget this, you may regret it later.

• Save your file.

• Highlight ALL the Members in the Inventor
  Browser, then select Generate Files from the context menu.
• Switch to Windows Explorer and browse to the
  OldVersions folder found in the iPart Member folder (shown above).

• You should see the same number of OldVersions
  files, as there were Members highlighted in the Inventor Browser.

• You should also check the Date Modified
  properties of the files, to make sure they were generated within the expected
  timeframe.

Congratulations, you have successfully created, published
and Checked In an iPart Factory and its Members to Vault.

Now, the next step is to get your head around Autodesk Inventor iAssembly Best Practices.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, or require clarification just fire away in the comments below.