October ADN Plugin of the Month, Inventor LinkParameters, Now Available

The October Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) Plugin of the Month is brought to you by our own Manufacturing Technical Consultant, Jan Liska. It was reviewed and enhanced by our own Developer Consultant, Philippe Leefsma.

Inventor LinkParameters available as the plugin of the month

As an Inventor 2011 or 2012 user, the LinkParameters allow you to easily create dependencies between parameters of various parts and sub-assemblies in the context of the top-level assembly in which they reside. You can visually select a parameter from a source component and link its value to a specific parameter in a target component. The plugin is based on the iLogic functionality that was introduced in Inventor 2011. It automatically generates the iLogic code required to link the values of the parameters for you, so you don't need to write any iLogic instructions.

Inventor users can use this add-on as supplied; however, if you have ever considered writing your own Inventor plugins, the source code has been provided as a Visual Studio 2008 project containing C# code (not required to run the plug-in). Come on - you can do it.

Once loaded, an additional button is inserted in the slideout menu of the iLogic panel, in the Manage Tab of the Assembly Ribbon. This functionality is only usable from within an assembly. When you run the LinkParameters command, a new modeless form is displayed where you can select source and target components. You can then create links between parameters by drag-n-dropping parameters from the source to the target list view.

Please give this a try and let us know how it works for you at [email protected]. We're particularly kean on hearing any stories of how you may have extended the functionality for your own purposes by modifying the source code.

Linking is alive in the lab.