Project name ipj

[lulumara]

My problem persist on checking it out drawings in Inventor, it will begin checking out but will says-- unable to set the project file " Project Name ipj" to the current project file in Inventor? Can any have a solution on this?

[Bishop]

It sounds like the file was originally created with a different project name.

 

One of the guys in my office had the same problem, and he wound up basically having to create a whole bunch of extra project files to cover all the different variations that had been used since time immemorial here, so that no matter when - and under which project - the file had been checked in, he'd still be able to get it out.

 

Oddly, I've never had that problem, even though our main project files are set up the same and we're working with the same files.

[DreadPirateRoberts]

Are there any disadvantages to working in only one project? I know you have to work in specific projects when making templates in Inventor, but beyond these types of setup things, whats wrong with making everything in one project?

This way Inventor doesn't have any trouble finding all your work.

 

We just purchased Inventor and I want to make sure I start some good practices to avoid all those 'different variations'

[Bishop]

That's the way that we do it. We've got one project - designs.ipj - and everything falls under that. It's not, however, the way that everything was done in the past, so there's about 6 different setups floating around in our vault.

[ConMan]

DPR,

 

The company I work for has been using Inventor for about 2 1/2 yrs. A little at first and now the majority of projects are solid modelled. We set up a new .ipj for each job because otherwise we would have tens of thousands of parts and assemblies to sift through. We have a folder of "standard" parts that are common between machines. The project .ipj can be set up to point at your individual job folder as well as however many other job or library folders (the "standard" parts) you like.

 

The big point I would say is to try and think a few to several years down the road and pick whatever option would work best for you.

[Bishop]

Even having multiple thousands to sift through isn't that bad in a single project file.

 

I'm in the engineering group for a company that makes a LOT of different products through a LOT of different processes. My main folder for my project was (at last count) somewhere around 50 gigs of stuff, and that's not counting the stuff that's been vaulted and deleted, nor does it count the ~200 gigs of old stuff that's more or less unsorted on my external hard drive.

 

We have one main project file, which points at C:\DESIGNS for the workspace, as well as a library for commonly used hardware stuff.

 

The designs folder is broken down further by process: there's a folder for structural steel, folders for injection molded HDPE, polypropylene and ABS, folders for polymer concrete, one for traditional concrete, one for roto-molded plastic, and several others. Each one of those is further broken down by size, then for each size there's folders for body / cover / unit / mold / accessories / misc / etc. Inside those, it's broken down by SKU.

 

There's many, many thousands of parts and assemblies, but they can still be organized and easy to find.

[DreadPirateRoberts]

Bishop, I think I might go with your idea. We already have a folder system setup like you mentioned for our CAD and CNC programs, but ours is based on customer name. So in our DESIGNS folder we would have one .ipj file and then folders A-Z.

My concern with creating a .ipj file for each job is that that is one more thing I have to remember...maybe not the best reason, but since we have a very small CAD team (me) it may be legitimate.

 

My first instinct was to create an ipj. for each job, and now I'm finding its a pain to remap the project files when I forget to chose the right project in the beginning. I'd rather just set it, and forget it. In my case, I'm also mostly only going to be modeling pretty simple things (just a few parts in an assembly) so their pieces should be fairly easy to keep track of.

Thanks for all the input!