Inventor Tip: Customizing Inventor InfoTip properties

Ever wonder if you could modify the Inventor InfoTip? You know that thing that appears when you hover your cursor over a file in anticipation before opening your design in an Inventor window or in Windows Explorer?

Need to check on some iProperties before opening a file or if a Manager approved a design without triggering iProperties or opening the file and checking? Well, you are in luck, that’s what we are going to look at in this post.

First off, we need to understand the scope of what CAN show up here. There are standard iProperties (not all of them btw) that can be exposed to the InfoTip. We can’t directly expose Custom iProperties, but we will get to a workaround later in the post. Let’s start by finding our config file for this little wonder.

Make sure you have the ProgramData visible or just browse right to it. For Inventor 2015, its right here –> C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Inventor 2015\InfoTip\en-US ; there you will find InfoTip.config. Open it in Notepad or your editor of choice. If opened in Notepad, you might have to fix your carriage returns so it’s easier to read.

Here are the important items to adjust in the file:

id: Assigns a unique internal ID for each property. You can’t control the ID; the ID is the ID. If someone figures out how to call a Custom or other properties here, I am all ears.

name: Sets the property name to display in the Info tip. You can change the name.

exclude: Controls whether to display the property in the info tip. “Yes” turns off the display of the info tip.

So here is what our InfoTip looks like out of the box…

After some modifications to the InfoTip, we can easily get this where we now have the Eng. Approved By, the Project and anything else we want to have.

Wait a minute, how’d he get the Material in there? That wasn’t in the InfoTip.config file? Well you are absolutely right. I added it because I found a list (IProperyNameTable) of these guys online from the ModtheMachine blog. Again, not all of them work, but Material sure did.

Now what about the Custom iProperties we want to see? Well, we have to get a little creative and understand that we might have to use a placeholder iProperty to get it in the InfoTip. Here I created a Custom iProperty called SAP Number (for those of you that don’t know the pleasures of SAP, it stands for Slow and Painful or Stop all Production depending on who you talk to). That Custom iProperty is then added to a Standard iProperty by use of an iProperty forumula. Simply use an = and < and > brackets to surround your Custom iProperty name wherever you want it to be placed.

Then I changed the InfoTip name to match my new iProperty mapping.

Which in turn now allows me to view my SAP Number before even opening a file in Inventor or in Windows.

As a last note, you may need to reboot or reregister the InfoTip.dll through the command line to see the change take place. I didn’t have to do that though. Also, there is currently a broken component to this in Windows 8 where you cannot right click on a file and get iProperties or use the InfoTip. So use this primarily for Modeling Files or IDWs if you like this.

For more of Mark’s Inventor tips and tricks, check out IMAGINiT Manufacturing Solutions Blog.

Mark Flayler is a senior application engineer with IMAGINiT Technologies, specializing in manufacturing environments. He is also PSE and ATC certified in AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, Autodesk Data Management and Autodesk Inventor.