Inventor 2014 - Copy Components with Constraints

by Luke Davenport

Hello again,

A quick post this time. You may have read somewhere that you can now copy and paste components in Inventor 2014 and their constraints will be retained. I thought I’d put together a few brief comments on that.

1)      Inventor 2013 (and previous) behaviour:

As shown in the screenshot above, if you select multiple components in a top level assembly and copy and paste them, they will be pasted as an array of single parts, and all your hard won constraints will need to be applied a second time.

2)      Inventor 2014 (with no updates or only update 1 applied) behaviour:

So, having heard of the new fancy copy and paste behaviour, I tried this out in Inventor 2014, only to discover that not only did my components not paste with the constraints intact, they didn’t paste at all! (Nothing happened when I clicked ‘paste’). Not ideal. According to later information from Autodesk this can be due to long filenames. Update 2 for Inventor 2014 to the rescue!

3)      Inventor 2014 with Update 2 applied behaviour:

Copying and pasting multiple components works exactly how you want it to. All constraints are retained, even when copying and pasting multiple files to new or existing assemblies. Happy days!

Moral of the story? – Keep your installation of Inventor up-to-date!