Autodesk® Inventor® API Object Model reference document | Inventor | Autodesk Knowledge Network.Inventor Sample Files | Inventor | Autodesk Knowledge Network

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Install Inventor DeveloperTools: “C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\Inventor 20XX\SDK\replace.me” In case you cannot install DeveloperTools due to missing Visual Studio please find PI Object Model reference document for different releases of Inventor here. Sep 04,  · Inventor Customization Welcome to Autodesk’s Inventor Customization Forums. Share your knowledge, ask questions, and explore popular Inventor Customization topics related to programming, creating add-ins, macros, working with the API or creating iLogic tools. Autodesk inventor download free. Photo & Graphics tools downloads – Autodesk Inventor Professional by Autodesk and many more programs are available for instant and free download.
 
 

 

Lesson 2: Programming Overview – Autodesk Inventor | Search | Autodesk Knowledge Network

 

Turn on suggestions. Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type. Showing results for. Search instead for. Did you mean:. This page has been translated for your convenience with an automatic translation service. This is not an official translation and may contain errors and inaccurate translations. First, VBA is delivered with Inventor and does not require you to purchase an additional programming language.

Second, you are able to embed programs within Inventor documents. If you have a program that is data-specific, this is a convenient way to keep the program with the data it is designed to use. You’re not forced to save your programs in Inventor documents.

You can also save programs in separate files so they can be shared among users and documents. Third, VBA runs in the same process as Inventor so you gain the performance advantages of being in the same process. Add-Ins are a special type of Inventor program. This has a huge advantage in that the add-in is able to insert itself into Inventor’s user-interface and connect to events to be able to watch for and respond to activity within Inventor.

This allows add-in functionality to appear the same as built-in Inventor functionality. Add-ins also have a distinct advantage over VBA in delivering your program to users and managing your source code. Add-Ins cannot be created with VBA. A standalone EXE is a program that runs on its own and connects to Inventor. This type of program is typically used in the case where you have a program that has its own interface and doesn’t require the user to interactively work with Inventor.

For example a batch plotting utility can be an EXE that runs independently of Inventor. It might monitor a database watching for new records to be added which describe documents that need to be plotted. When a new record is created in the database, the standalone EXE starts Inventor, if it’s not already running, opens the desired document and plots it, all without any user interaction.

Standalone EXEs run out-of-process to Inventor, so there is some performance penalty, but since they are not usually used for interactive processes it’s rarely an issue. Even in the case where performance is an issue it’s possible to combine the use of an add-in and an exe. You can have an add-in that does the majority of the work and an exe that calls the add-in. For example, if you write a program using Excel’s VBA that connects to Inventor, your VBA program is running in the process space of Excel and is communicating with Inventor out of process.

Apprentice is an ActiveX server that can be used by other applications to get access to Inventor data. Apprentice is essentially a subset of Inventor that runs in-process to the application using it. Apprentice doesn’t have a user interface and the only way to interact with it is through its API. Apprentice provides access to a limited set of full Inventor functionality with the primary areas being assembly structure, B-Rep, geometry, and iProperties.

Most access to information through Apprentice is read-only; a couple of exceptions to this are iProperties and file references. Apprentice is useful in any standalone application that needs access to information contained within Inventor documents. The alternative is to use Inventor. Using Apprentice is much more efficient than using Inventor to perform the same operations because Apprentice is able to run in the same process as your application and because it doesn’t have a user interface it can perform many operations faster.

Another advantage of Apprentice Server is that it’s available at no cost and is available on the public Autodesk website as part of Inventor View.

More detailed information about Apprentice can be found in the Apprentice Server section. A COM Automation interface exposes it functions through a set of objects.

A programming object has many similarities to real-world objects. A company that sells chairs might allow a customer to design their own chair by filling out an order form, like the one shown below. The options on the order form define the various properties of the desired chair. By setting the properties to the desired values the customer is able to describe the specific chair they want. In addition to properties, objects also support methods. Methods are basically instructions that the object understands.

In the real world, these are actions you would perform with the chair. For example, you could move the chair, cause it to fold up, or throw it in the trash. In the programming world the objects are smarter and instead of you performing the action you tell the object to perform the action itself; move, fold, and delete.

A third aspect of objects is that they can support events. In the real-world events are equivalent to installing sensors on an object to track when certain things happen to the object. For example, you can attach a sensor to the seat of the chair to be notified whenever anyone sits on it. In the programming world you can use events to be notified when certain things happen within Inventor.

One final concept of object-oriented programming is that of a class. Going back to the chair object, you can think of the class as the order form the customer fills out to describe the specific chair they want.

The order form represents the class and the resulting chair is the object, or an instance of the class. For example, look at the extrude feature shown below. For each extrude feature that you create in a part, there is an ExtrudeFeature programming object that represents it. The ExtrudeFeature object supports various properties and methods that allow you to query and edit the extrusion. These properties and methods provide equivalent functionality to what you specify when creating and editing an extrude feature the user interface.

For example, the ExtrudeFeature object supports the Name property. This is the name of the feature that is displayed in the object browser. You can get the value of this property to see the current name of the feature and you can set the value of this property to change the name of the feature. The ExtentType property specifies that this is a distance extent. The Operation specifies that this is a “new solid” operation. The Profile returns the sketch information that defines the shape of the feature.

These are the API equivalent of the options provided in the mini dialog shown below. Because the API allows you to do the same things you can do through the user-interface there are strong similarities between the two. Having a good understanding of Inventor from the standpoint of an end-user will make the API easier to understand and use. By gaining access to these objects through the API you can use their various methods, properties, and events to control and react to Inventor.

The first concept to understand before going further is the object model. The full Inventor object model is shown below. You can see that there are a lot of objects, but most programs will use only a small portion of them. The object model is a hierarchical diagram that illustrates the relationships between objects. One of the most important objects in this hierarchy is the Application object. The Application object represents the Inventor application and is the top-most object in the hierarchy.

The Application object supports methods and properties that let you control Inventor but most important, it supports properties that return other Inventor objects.

Because of this, once you have the Application object you can access any other object in the hiearchy. The object model picture is useful as a tool because it illustrates how to get from one object to another. You just need to understand how to traverse the hierarchy to get to the specific object you want. The diagram below illustrates the portion of the object model that is needed to access the part extrude feature, ExtrudeFeature object. These concepts are: obtaining the Application object, traversing the object model, collection objects, and derived objects.

The following looks at each of these. The first thing illustrated in the sample is accessing the Application object. When writing an add-in, when Inventor starts the add-in it passes it the Application object. When writing an exe you need to use other API’s to get the Application object. In this case you can choose to either get the Application object from a running instance of Inventor or to start Inventor and get the Application object from it.

Below is some VB. Net exe code that is the equivalent the VBA code above. The first portion of the code uses the.

Net GetActiveObject method to get the Inventor application object. This is wrapped within a Try Catch statement to handle the case where Inventor isn’t running.

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