![]() The biggest problem I’m facing is typing in the repetitive filenames, such as ABC123.iam and ABC123-IM.ipt, DEF123.iam and DEF123-IM.ipt, etc. Many of these files will be empty reference part files that can be used for bill of material downloads, such as instruction booklets, for later output to an ERP system. Is it possible to use the same technique to create new Inventor files based on filenames taken from an excel spread sheet? I need to create large amounts of data for our inventor vault with a specific naming convention that is different to the part and assembly templates we use daily. This look like a very useful utility – thank you for taking the time to create and share it! I’ll soon produce an English version with the updated code so more audience can understand it. If you guys understand Portuguese, you might find this video I made in my language for my comrades useful. Please check it out and let me know if it was useful for your job! I published it on GitHub in this address. If you think this tool might be useful for you too, please let me know in the comments! For larger assemblies, of >700 parts, a reliable manual renaming took up to 3-4 hours and could be reduced to something like 10 minutes. So the use of this tool saved us quite a lot of time on the renaming of files. Renamed files in Explorer Files after the renaming in the explorer view… Files to be renamed are shown in the table in boldĢ.4. In this case, not all files were selected to be renamed as some parts belong to the library. Correspondences loaded in the file being displayed on-screen Loading the CSV file CSV file being selected in the file browserĢ.3. Screen of the “Batch Renaming” add-in showing the list of components referenced by the assemblyĢ.2. ***Edit: I changed the button name to “ Batch Renaming“. So how does it look in Inventor? Follow the step-by-step screenshots shown below.Ģ.1. Main assembly loaded in my API interface It renames all the files and then redoes the links in all levels of the assembly. It finds out whether there are any equally-named *.idw files in the path. It figures out what files need to be renamed if they match the name in the “from” column of the correlation table. I open the main assembly file and import the correlation table on my API-brew software. A table like the one shown below will be the output from Excel as a CSV file and read by this program: Input CSV file format for the renaming system Here I think Excel will always be way more flexible than any piece of software I would ever write, so I decided to leave the rule creation to the freedom of the user. ![]() I want to make a file list using Excel VBA (which will list the file names for the current assembly) and, using some made-up rule, assign new names to the existing files. So, now that I showed the available options and how they did not meet my needs, let me state what I want to do and what I came up with using the Inventor API. And new files (which are probably going to happen in a copied design) will have to be named correctly during design, which is not always possible under an ERP system. The problem is, you need to have the new names beforehand. It does what it’s supposed to do: Copies a design and renames the files. Using the CopyDesign add-in sample from Inventor SDK: This is an example piece of software that comes with the Inventor API SDK.Sometimes it hurts productivity even more as the files are organized according to the tree, so finding them is another issue. You still have to do the renaming manually. Imagine you as a designer already having the old-new naming correlations in an Excel table, but unable to paste them in Design Assistant. Using the Design Assistant: This tool is nice, but there is a missing functionality that keeps it from being something usable for large assemblies: One cannot paste a table in the treeview.At least you can print the correlation table from Excel. You relieve the pain of renaming the files one by one, but the relinking still needs to be done manually in Inventor. Excel VBA to rename files: This is a little bit less cumbersome.Apart from renaming the files one by one, you have to keep track of the old-new name correlations so when you open the assemblies in Inventor, you can redo the links manually. Manual renaming in explorer: This is a pain in the ***.Well, there are many ways of doing this, but I found that all the built-in ways in Autodesk Inventor have some sort of caveat: Even higher are the chances that you already had to rename all the files in a given assembly to match an ERP needs or a coding system needs. If you’re a mechanical designer for a living, chances are that you already had to copy an existing design. *Edit: New, translated, version posted on GitHub with install instructions.
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