Unleashing Hidden Powers of Inventor with the API
Part 2 of 4: Using iProperties with Inventor VBA
Brian Ekins – Autodesk, Inc. The second article in this four-part series provides an introduction to the basic concepts you need to understand when programming Inventor. These concepts are put into practice as we use API to query and modify iProperties using VBA. Key Topics:
q Understand how Inventor provides a programming interface q Inventor's object model q Using API to query and modify iProperties of a document
Target Audience: Autodesk Inventor users who want to increase their productivity with Inventor by writing programs
About the Author:
Brian is an Autodesk Inventor API evangelist and works with professionals and companies to help make using Inventor's programming interface easier. Brian began working in the CAD industry over 25 years ago. He has worked in CAD administration, as an application engineer, CAD API designer, and consultant. Brian was the original designer of Inventor's API and has presented at conferences and taught classes throughout the world to thousands of users and programmers. brian.ekins@autodesk.com
Autodesk Inventor Programming Using iProperties with Inventor VBA
Introduction
The goal of this class is to provide enough information that anyone will be able to write a program to automate working with Inventor's iProperties. The class is not intended to be a comprehensive coverage of VBA programming or even iProperties, but focuses on the features that are most commonly used. We'll begin by looking briefly at VBA and the steps required to begin writing a program. Then we'll discuss the concepts around Inventor's programming interface. Next we'll look at the interface for programming iProperties. Finally, we'll look at several examples that demonstrate all of these concepts.
VBA Basics
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a programming environment developed by Microsoft and licensed by other companies to integrate into their applications. Autodesk licenses VBA and includes it in AutoCAD and Inventor.. This provides all customers of Inventor with a free development environment. If you are unfamiliar with VBA please see the companion article, "Getting started with Inventor VBA". You access VBA through Inventor using the Macro | Visual Basic Editor command in the Tools menu, or by pressing Alt-F11. Once the VBA environment is open, the first thing I recommend you do is change some of the VBA settings. In the VBA environment run the Options command from the Tools menu. Change the Auto Syntax Check and Require Variable Declaration settings to those shown below.

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