Inventor 2014 - Quick Creation and Editing of iParts

by Luke Davenport

Using iParts?

If (as occasionally happens with your first play of a new tool) you’ve found editing the iPart table cumbersome and error-prone – it shouldn’t be!

Let me tell you about a little tool called ‘Edit Member Scope’ that I’ve found VERY useful.

It allows you to effectively treat each iPart member as a different part, create your edits in each part in turn, and have those edits automatically added to the iPart table for you. This means you can bypass the normal ‘Edit Table’ and ‘Edit via Spreadsheet’ options for most of the tasks you would normally use the table for. You definitely want to a have quick look over the table after you’ve made your edits to ensure your edits have gone to plan (and you haven’t added unwanted columns by accident!).

Rather than trawling through snapshots, I’m going to take you straight to my customary blog video now – it’ll do a much better job of explaining this. It shows some neat ways of doing the following using the ‘Member Scope’ option:

1)      Existing features – vary these for each member of the ipart.

2)      New features – create these on a member-by-member basis.

3)      Adding an ‘Appearance’ column to the ipart and creating variations.

One thing you MUST remember is: Always set the ‘Scope’ back to ‘Edit Factory Scope’ when you’re done! Otherwise you’ll be working on one part when you think you’re working on them all!  Fail.

Also note that the member scope option is also available for iAssemblies, and just like we’ve seen with iParts – the member scope option allows much easier and more intuitive control of which components are included in different configurations of your assembly, as well as much more besides.

Hope you enjoy a more streamlined family table authoring process!