Automating Drawing Title Block Forms in Inventor

One of my favorite uses of iLogic has to be the automation of filling out a Title Block in Inventor. I commonly see a customer run into a tired method of using Prompted Entries in their TBs. While this is very reminiscent of AutoCAD, inside Inventor it is actually a poor way to fill things out.

If you need the same Prompted Entry across mulitple sheets, then you essentially run into the problem of having to retype it over and over again. If you were to use Custom iProperties, then it will carry through the entire sheet set. This is why I stopped using attributes in AutoCAD as well and started using Fields in that software as well.

The other important thing to remember about the whole Prompted Entry vs. iProperties question is that Promnpted Entries are NOT searchable and indexable inside Autodesk Vault. I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to search on my data in any way that I want and this starts to limit me.

The other common question I get is with a custom iProperty, how can I get that as a drop down list in an iLogic Form? Well, there really isn’t a straight forward way, so I have some code that will take a Multi-Value Parameter and export it to Custom iProperties (which Inventor doesn’t let you do out of the box). From there the Custom iProperty is then utilzed in the Title Block and therefore indexed in Vault.

Here is the link to that post with the code: iLogic post for Text Fx to iProp

Now, for the rest of the process, check out this Tech Tip I put together that will walk you through the theory, application, and administration of the iLogic Form inside a drawing.

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

Mark Flayler is an 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.