Inventor Apprentice and Design Assistant

[MMartens]

I am familiar with the Solidworks Document Manager API and how to use it to perform API actions on files that aren't open in Solidworks. Apparently, Autodesk has something similar called Autodesk Inventor Design Assistant and its associated API which seems to be called Apprentice. I believe from what I have read, the Apprentice API is how Solidworks PDM is able to perform PDM actions on Inventor files.

Does anyone know where I should be able to locate the Apprentice API? I would like to use it on a project I am working on but have been unable to locate where the library is located.

[bnemec]

Usually these libs are from the vendor; Example Solidworks Doc Manager is downloaded from Solidworks. I think you'll need to get it from autodesk or find the .dll in your Inventor installation.

a little searching landed me to this, might be what you're looking for.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/ ... -2021.html

https://help.autodesk.com/view/INVNTOR/ ... EEF821D50A

[MMartens]

We already have both Inventor and Inventor View in our system. I was just trying to find the API library for it. As I was reading the using Apprentice Server article you sent, I came to the realization, based on their wording, the Apprentice API Library may actually a subset of the overall Inventor library. So I opened my object browser and sure enough. There it was.

Thanks for the help.

[bnemec]

We already have both Inventor and Inventor View in our system. I was just trying to find the API library for it. As I was reading the using Apprentice Server article you sent, I came to the realization, based on their wording, the Apprentice API Library may actually a subset of the overall Inventor library. So I opened my object browser and sure enough. There it was.

image.png

Thanks for the help.

Sounds good. The Libs needed for managing Solid Edge files without starting Solid Edge or Design Manager (ie needing a license) are in the installation folder. Solidworks requires other hoop jumping to get Document Manager lib. I wasn't sure which route Inventor uses.

[MMartens]

For those who may be searching...

When attempting to reference the Inventor dll in visual studio, it didn't show up in the COM library listings as I expected. I had to do a hard drive search for autodesk.inventor.interop.dll to find where it gets installed.

[bnemec]

For those who may be searching...

When attempting to reference the Inventor dll in visual studio, it didn't show up in the COM library listings as I expected. I had to do a hard drive search for autodesk.inventor.interop.dll to find where it gets installed.
image.png

at the risk of being irrelevant I'll chance it and just mention a couple of pits I tend to fall in, repeatedly:
- check the bitness of your project (prefer 32bit is still default for VS 2019) as it must match the dll you're using. I lost many hours and a portion of my mind because of this when Solid Edge went to 64bit only at ST9.
- Also, most of the time these libraries cannot be embedded so in the project references you may want to keep unchecked the "Embed Interop Types" option. I don't fully grasp what all goes on for embedded or not, I just know that none of the CAD APIs I've worked with would work embedded.
- Although API help docs may be tough to follow at times, they're still the best place to start. I highly recommend finding the "Getting started with Inventor API" tutorial that mentions this library.