Inventor Feature Properties

 Last week, I had a support call that the solution ended up being a familiar, yet relatively unused function of Inventor.  I had already been using Inventor for years before I found it and  I am not sure how many users even know about it.  I am talking about Conditional Suppression of the Feature Properties.  

Inventor Feature Properties users access to several different properties of a given feature in the browser.  It will allow a user to change the name of the feature, create some conditional suppression, enable or disable certain Adaptive elements, and change the appearance of the feature.

In this case, I want to focus on the conditional suppression options.  These allow a user to create conditional suppression of a feature based on the value of a parameter.  You might say, I can already do that with iLogic.  This is true, however, iLogic requires a certain level of comfort with writing VB.net code.  Inventor Feature Properties don't require any code and offer an alternative to users that are intimidated by iLogic.

The premise is really simple, you can access the dialog by right-clicking on a feature in the browser.

Once in the dialog, it is just a matter of defining the conditions of the suppression.  

The user can enable If then build and expression related to a parameter.  Your choices for parameters will be limited to any parameters of that feature and any parameter with a meaningful name.  Then it is a matter of picking the typical equation types, such as equals, does not equal, greater than, greater than or equal, less than, or less than or equal.  When it comes to the value to test for, it can be a static value or another parameter values.

Here is a simple demo video of how this can work.

This is a pretty simple command, but it is capable of quite a lot.  It is just a matter of identifying driving relationships.  At my job, we get a lot of requests from our customers to help them add automation to their designs.  We will typically lean on iLogic for that automation, but before we do, we consider if something like the Feature Properties can help us accomplish the given task before we jump to iLogic.  So think of the Feature Properties the next time you need to create some conditional suppression.