Good To Know: Changing Inventor Position Numbers

Autodesk Support

Aug 17, 2018


I got some requests around position numbers in Inventor and how and where to change them best to be aligned with Vault Professional. The challenge of changing position numbers within Inventor is that there are several ways to get the job done. You can change position numbers in the Assembly, Drawing or in Vault Professional in the BOM tab. So let's bring some light into this area.

First of all, the Assembly is always the master. During a Check in into Vault the assembly get's analyzed and the BOM information including position numbers will be extracted. To get this done you should double check if the "Structured" Tab within the Inventor BOM is turned on. Otherwise the Vault Professional BOM will show an empty position number when you assign an Item.

Structured tab is turned on

Next - we should discuss where to change a position number. Ideally we would change it in the Master (Assembly). But changing the position number in a table view is sometimes not the easiest way because we miss the 2D representation of the model which we would have in a 2D drawing. The same challenge we would have changing the position number within Vault. The "context" to the 2D drawing is lost and we struggle a bit in doing the right thing. Also the position number might then overlap a dimension or the a geometry. In addition Vault Professional will not write back any changes of a position number to the 3D model or drawing - a customization would be needed. As far as I evaluated the API such a customization should be possible to do. Customer feedback I got is that changes of the position number will be done mostly in the drawing so we can arrange the balloons and move them back and forth easily.

To get the position numbers well aligned in Inventor and Vault Professional you should always write back changes of the position number from the drawing into the assembly! Changes of position numbers in the Parts List of a drawing will result in a "static" field which is marked in bolded blue text. In this case the change affects ONLY the drawing. To get the changed information back into the assembly you must "promote" that change back to the assembly. This can be easily done within the Parts List Editor - the command is on the rigth mouse click menu when selecting a cell. The command is called "Save Item Overrides to BOM". Watch the video to figure out which change will affect what. Hope this helps!

 

 



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