By Chris Smith
Introduction
iLogic is a very power tool that comes out of the box with Inventor. It is a way of adding automation and rules to the software and our designs, to reduce time to market and increase efficiency of files.
Although there are a lot of users that incorporate iLogic rules into their designs, not many know how easy it is to share these rules with the rest of the team, or create team driven rules.
Understanding iLogic
Fist we need to understand the differences in iLogic rules. As we can see in the image below, there are Rules and External Rules.
Rules are contained within the design file that they are created in. If I create a rule in part A, that rule cannot be used in Part B.
External Rules are rules that can be run from any Inventor design file.
To enable us to create sharable rules we need to create them as external rules. The first time we create an External rule we get a window pop up asking us to save the rule in a location, either local or on a network drive. It is a good idea to create a rule and save it before progressing to the next section.
A simple rule to add can be found below. This rule will check if there is information in the description iProperty and pop a window if it is empty.
Save the rule in a location that can be accessed by all relevant users, like a network location or cloud storage drive with an ftp link.
Once you have saved the rule, we can close all open files in Inventor and return to the home screen.
Linking the application to the rules location
For other users to be able to access the shared rules they must provide Inventor with a folder path string. This can be done in the tools ribbon options.
To get access to the iLogic options, click the tools tab and then expand the options panel to reveal the iLogic configuration tool.
This will open a window where we can specify our rules folder path.
Click the + button in the top corner to add a new folder path. You can have as many as you like, but I would recommend keeping the list as small as possible.
Each user that wants to use the rules will have to do the same step in their own software. Once each user has added the link to their configuration, they can read and write rules to that folder.
This means that rules can be saved and backed up outside of Inventor and can be copied as text files for additional security against loss.
If you would like to know more about iLogic in Inventor, please contact Cadline.