Vaulting an Un-Vaulted Inventor Design

Administrators of Vault can pack Inventor designs into Vault easily and in bulk via the Autoloader.  However, often times an Inventor user, who isn’t on the Admin list, has built an Inventor model or assembly ‘on the side’ and is ready to add it into Vault.  The following outlines the steps that user can take to get an Inventor personal project into Vault.

Preliminary Setup:

If you haven’t already, access any existing Inventor Design stored in Vault.  This is done to build the folder structure needed to add the un-vaulted design.

In my example, I have a design in my “D:ProjectsInventor Projects” folder, while the Vault workspace is set to “D:ProjectsVault Workspace 2017”.

The Inventor assembly I will be moving over is a skid containing several sub-assemblies.  I will copy the entire folder structure of the skid assembly over to my “Vault Workspace 2017DesignsDRH Inventor Designs”.  This folder corresponds to the Vault folder where I store my Inventor projects inside of Vault.

Notice in the image above, I have already moved the Centrifugal Pump over.  I did not have to do this ahead of time, but it will make life a little easier already having sub-assemblies moved ahead of time.

Now open Inventor, and first change the Project now to the Vault Designs project.  Then open the top level assembly from the project moved.  In my case, that is Skid-Pumps-Piping.iam.

Now is the process of resolving links that you have in your assembly model.

Above you see that Inventor is looking for the gasket I used in the model.  That gasket IPT is located outside of the search folder structure defined by the Designs.IPJ file.  Best thing to do, is to copy that folder from the previous location and put it in the search path for the Content files.  After copying the folder, I can browse to that location for the vault project…

…click the Open button

And Inventor will register the location.  You may need to do this multiple times before all links are resolved.

Remember how I moved the Centrifugal Pump sub-assembly first?  We can see it located properly in the main assembly below.

If we highlight the pump within the Inventor Model Tree, we can right-click it to open.  Check the iProperties and we find that Inventor resolved the link automatically.

Now we are ready to check in the project design.  Change to Vault view of the Model Tree.

Right-click the assembly, and Check In…

Checking in Vault, I find both my Skid Assembly and the Content Center files I copied over when resolving links.