Inventor iLogic for Cabinetmaking – Demoting The Parts

The 56 parts that make up the Cabinet 01 assembly were further broken down into the sub assemblies shown in the image to the right. This is the part I think can be automated so I don’t want to dwell on the minutiae of part demotion here, but will instead gloss-over the procedure. Its not rocket science.

All that needs to be done is to open the assembly, then select a logical group of parts in the workspace, such as the face frame, then right click and choose Component > Demote, just like it is shown in the last post. Once the assembly is created, just right click and ground it, then turn off its visibility so that you have easy access to what is left to demote. Any parts that will not be part of an assembly can just have their visibility shut off as soon as you encounter them.

You just keep doing this routine until the workspace is empty, then restore the visibility of all, rearrange the order if you like, and you’re done. Easy peasy.

I did not time the procedure, but guess it took about 15 minutes or-so. This dosent sound like a big deal until you add up all of the cabinets. There were 10 in this test, but the test was a very small kitchen, and did not include uppers. The average would be closer to 15 cabinets, which would take 3 hours and 45 minutes to complete, or about a half day.

What I hope to do is speed up the process by coming up with a Solid Body naming scheme, and a corresponding add-in that will use the + signs shown to the left (or whatever the symbol needs to be), to both demote and rename the parts in the sub assemblies.

For instance, the first + in each of the names shown would be replaced with the name of the assembly that contains the sub assembly, which in this case would be Cab 01 as shown in the image above, the text after the first + is added to the Cab 01 (or whatever), and is used as the assembly’s name. Cab 01 Face Frame.iam for example.

All parts with +Face Frame at their beginning would become members of this new subassembly, and would be named whatever is after the last +. In this example, the first Face Frame body would become a part named R Stile, and would become a member of the Cab 01 Face Frame subassembly of the Cab 01 assembly. This scheme would extend out as far as needed by adding more plus signs and sub assembly names, with the part always being the last text in the string, and would always be contained within the preceding sub assembly.

The long-term solution would be for Autodesk to create a structuring scheme similar to the folders in the lower part of the Browser Bar, but with sub folders as well. The program would then honor the user created structure during the Component Creation process. It would also help during the modeling phase as the solid bodies are becoming as much of a problem as the old assembly browser was before the addition of browser folders in Inventor 2010. The older versions of Inventor, as anyone who has used the program for awile knows, had no way of sorting the items in the browser, which was a nightmare if you had thousands of parts. It caused people to create phantom assembles and other such nonsense in order to organize their models.

The next move is to go to the Mod The Machine Blog and ask the inventor of the Inventor API, Brian Ekins, for some advice……. and hopefully a bit of code I’ll post an update when there is something to report.

You are here: OpenDesignProject | Inventor Tutorials | Inventor iLogic for Cabinetmaking – Demoting The Parts