Daniel,

Thanks for the suggestion.

The 2010 product will have some enhancements that may help with this
workflow.
However, I am not able to comment on the specifics of the release at
this time.

Please keep the suggestions coming.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead

-----Original Message-----
From: dherman469 [mailto:dherman469]
Posted At: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 1:42 PM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: ipart Factories and Vault Manufacturing 2010
Subject: ipart Factories and Vault Manufacturing 2010

Hello,
I would like to suggest what I consider a crucial missing feature
in VM 2010. Suppose I make an ipart factory of a basic pipe. Suppose
this pipe has 3 lengths. I would create 1 single idw drawing and use a
table to show the 3 lengths available for this part. Now, I want to
make two different assembly files. Assembly 1 will use the pipe of
length 1. Assembly 2 will use the pipe of length 2. Inventor will
actually create 2 "child" files created from the original "parent" ipart
factory. That is all good. Then I will create 2 idw drawings, one for
assembly 1 and the second idw for assembly 2. Now I want to check in
everything. I also need to assign Items to everything in order to do a
Change Order. This is where VM seems to miss a critical point. An Item
will get assigned to both "child" files of the pipe. However, there is
no Item assigned to the ipart factory itself. So, the ipart factory is
not "locked" in any way. Anyone could go in and check out the factory
and make any changes they wanted. Also, suppose that a year from now I
want to add a length 4 to the offical idw. Without an Item assigned I
can't do a drawing change through a change order process. Sure, I could
make the IDW from one of the "child" files, but that doesn't really
solve the problem of the factory being unsecured.
In my ideal world, I would create my ipart factory and then check
it into Vault. I should then be able to click on the ipart factory and
assign an item to it. (No error message). Then it would be super cool
if Vault would automatically create all the "child" files from the ipart
factory and put them into the same Item as the factory. Then we'd have
the factory, the "children" and the idw all in one neat little Item.
That may be asking a lot with the whole automatic thing, but at the very
least I should be able to manually assign an Item to the ipart factory
for security purposes.

Any chance for this in VM 2011?

Daniel Hermanson
Spraying Systems Co.