Drawing Automation

I gave a high-level presentation about automating drawings in Inventor at AU 2007.  The most useful information from that presentation is the sample programs, but apparently they aren’t available from the AU website since I’ve had a couple of requests for them recently.  Remember this is from a couple of years ago and Inventor now supports some things that it didn’t then.  Here’s a download that contains the original class handout plus all of the sample programs.

Comments

[Don Wen]

Thanks Brian. Just for others info, the downloaded file has to be renamed as a .zip file to open it.

[Abhishek Singhal]

Brian

The class handout gives an excellent overview of what is achievable and what to expect with the drawing API that existed at that time.

However, many new features have been added since then and one of the important ones to me is the ability to add balloons.

I am trying to build an application where drawings will be created automatically. In our case, the same assembly is used in several drawings each of which focuses on a different part of the assembly. The BOM of each drawing is available separately and the application knows which componentoccurences in the tree correspond to those items.

Ok. Now the questions.

1. Is it possible to customize the auto balloon feature (present in Inventor UI) through the API to mark only the items of interest.

2. If the answer to above question is no, I guess the only solution is for the application to actually make the balloons for the items of interest through API.
In that case, would there be a sample available which can show what are the issues to take care (placement etc.) during auto ballooning ?

Thanks and Regards
Abhishek