Inventor二次开发入门

Inventor二次开发入门Inventor二次开发入门 (1)课程1：开始接触InventorAPI，用写一个最简单的插件，实现选择集的隐藏 (2)课程2：帮助了解VisualStudio编程环境以及基本需要熟悉的方面 (12)课程3：深入解释课程1里出现的InventorAPI相关代码，帮助了解相关对象 (25)课程4：学习简单的带界面程序，了解其中的逻辑，以及如何操作选择集 (35)课程5：操作对象的附着属性（Attributes） (45)课程6：基于前面课程，制作一个更加丰富的插件 (61)课程7：深入学习的建议 (70)课程1：开始接触InventorAPI，用写一个最简单的插件，实现选择集的隐藏在本课中，你将开始写一个使用Autodesk Inventor API基于隐藏所选组件的应用程序。

演示视频（英文）演示代码lesson1_vb-net.zip (zip - 49Kb)lesson1_c-sharp.zip (zip - 73Kb)根据步骤来创建你的第一个插件1. Launch the Visual Basic Express development environment:Open Visual Basic 2010 Express using the Windows Start menu, selecting AllPrograms, then Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express, and then MicrosoftVisual Basic 2010 Express. Note: You can also use Visual Basic 2008 Expresswith this guide. Projects for both 2010 and 2008 are provided.2. Open a class library project:Inside Visual Basic Express, on the File menu, click Open Project. Navigate tothe subfolder of the supporting material you downloaded at the top of this guidecalled lesson1_VisualExpress2010 and open the project contained within it by selecting the project file MyFirstInventorPlugin_Lesson1.vbproj.3. Open the code:In the open project you will see a form with one button (if you don‟t see the Form, click on Form1.vb in the Solution Explorer frame in the upper right hand side).Right click on Form1 in the Solution Explorer and select View Code or justdouble click on the Form.4. Add the code:In the code window, type the code below into the Sub Button1_Click. (This is what runs when the button is clicked.) You may need to scroll down towards thebottom of the code to find the place to add the below code, looking for the words …Add code for Lesson 1 here‟.To get the full experience of developing with Visual Basic Express – including the use of features such as IntelliSense – we recommend you type the code from this guide rather than copying and pasting it.That said, if constrained for time you can also copy and paste into the Visual Basic Express code window, although this will reduce the experience you gain from working with the code directly.If _invApp.Documents.Count = 0 ThenMsgBox("Need to open an Assembly document")ReturnEnd IfIf _invApp.ActiveDocument.DocumentType <> _DocumentTypeEnum.kAssemblyDocumentObject ThenMsgBox("Need to have an Assembly document active")ReturnEnd IfDim asmDoc As AssemblyDocumentasmDoc = _invApp.ActiveDocumentIf asmDoc.SelectSet.Count = 0 ThenMsgBox("Need to select a Part or Sub Assembly")ReturnEnd IfDim selSet As SelectSetselSet = asmDoc.SelectSetTryDim compOcc As ComponentOccurrenceDim obj As ObjectFor Each obj In selSetcompOcc = objDebug.Print()compOcc.Visible = FalseNextCatch ex As ExceptionMsgBox("Is the selected item a Component?")MsgBox(ex.ToString())ReturnEnd Try5. Save the file:On the File menu, click Save All.6. Build the project:The code you have written is in human readable form. To make the code readable by a computer, you will need to translate it or “build” it.Inside Visual Basic Express, in the Debug menu, click Build Solution to compile and build your plug-in. The “Build Success” message shows in status bar of the Visual Basic Express window if the code is successfully built.That’s it! You have just written your first plug-in for Autodesk Inventor. Let’s run the plug-in to see what it does.Running the Plug-in1. Start Autodesk Inventor. (Note: When the plug-in is run it will start a new sessionof Inventor if one is not already open.)2. Create or open an existing Inventor assembly:Either unzip the file Clutch_Bell_Simplified.zip, and open theClutch_Bell_Simplified.iam assembly or within Inventor make sure you have anassembly of your choosing active. There are several types of document that canbe created or worked with inside Inventor. The most commonly used documenttypes are Part (.ipt), Assembly (.iam) and Drawing (.idw). Open a new assemblyand place some parts using the standard Inventor user-interface.3. Run your plug-in with Inventor and allow the plug-in to communicate withInventor:To make Visual Basic Express execute the code you have entered, select Start Debugging on the Debug menu (you can use the F5 key or click on the green arrow –which looks like a “play” button – on the Debugging toolbar). This will cause your form to be displayed. You may need to minimize VB Express to see both the form and Inventor.4. Work with the plug-in:Select one or more (by using the Ctrl key) components in the assembly that is active inside Inventor and then click Button1 on the form to execute your code and hide the selected components.5. To re-display the invisible components use the Inventor Assembly browser (youcan identify them via their component icons, which should now be grayed out). In the browser, right-click on the invisible components and pick Visibility, making them visible once again.Congratulations! You have just written your first plug-in for Autodesk Inventor. You will be reviewing the code in detail in Lesson 3.Before you move on to the next lessons, let us go back to some of the things we skipped over earlier, starting with basic concepts about programming, and the benefits it can bring to your day-to-day work.Additional TopicsIntroduction to ProgrammingThe code you have just executed that hides the selected components is only 30 lines long and more than half of the code that you entered into the project is doing error checking. The code that actually does the work can be narrowed down to these few lines of code:Dim asmDoc As AssemblyDocumentasmDoc = _invApp.ActiveDocumentDim selSet As SelectSetselSet = asmDoc.SelectSetDim compOcc As ComponentOccurrenceDim obj As ObjectFor Each obj In selSetcompOcc = objcompOcc.Visible = FalseNextAs you can see, a small amount of code can go a long way to simplify working with Inventor. Software programming allows you to capture the logic of a particular manual procedure once and then reap the benefits over and over again, every time you want to perform this functionality.What is Programming?A simple answer to this question is: Computer programming is the process of creating a sequence of instructions to tell the computer to do something. You can look at your program as a sequence of instructions. During the course of the upcoming lessons, you will look at the various lines and blocks of code in the context of being instructions for a computer.If you were to explain what computers are to a young child, you might say: a computer is a tool that follows instructions you provide. Programming is one way of giving instructions to the computer. Internally, a computer sees these instructions encoded as a series of numbers (also called machine code). The human-readable instructions you saw at the beginning of this lesson are called source code and the computer converts these instructions into machine code which it can then read and execute. A sequence of such instructions (or code), written to perform a specific task, is called a program and a collection of such programs and related data is called software. Autodesk Inventor is one such software product.Source code can be written in different languages, just as humans use different languages to communicate between ourselves. The language you will be using in this guide is called Visual ().What is an API?API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface: the way a software programmer can communicate with a software product. For instance, the Inventor API is the way programmers can work with Inventor, andestablishes what functionality a software programmer can use within Inventor. Such as the Inventor API allows you to write instructions for Inventor to execute one after the other.Putting this slightly differently: commercial software companies, such as Autodesk, often distribute a set of libraries that you can use in your own program to interact with a particular software product, such as Autodesk Inventor, and extend its functionality. This set of libraries is known as the software product’s API.The type of program you write to interact with a software product and extend its functionality will depend upon how the API has been designed and what has been exposed (through APIs) for you to work with.What is a Plug-in?A software plug-in is a type of program module (or file) that adds functionality to a software product, usually in the form of a command automating a task or some customization of the product’s behavior. When you talk about a plug-in for Inventor – and you will also hear the term AddIn or Application used for this product –we mean a module containing code that makes use of the Inventor API. The code can connect to Inventor to automate tasks, or be loaded by Inventor and used to adjust its behavior of Inventor under certain conditions, such as when a particular command is executed by the user of the plug-in.For terminology purposes, an Inventor AddIn would also be considered a plug-in. An AddIn is a special kind of plug-in that automatically loads when Inventor is started, has high performance and appears to the user to be part of Inventor..课程2：帮助了解VisualStudio编程环境以及基本需要熟悉的方面In the previous lesson, you saw how you can increase productivity in Autodesk Inventor by implementing a plug-in built from a small amount of code.You will probably have heard the terms COM and .NET from Lesson 1 with reference to programming with Inventor. Both COM and .NET are technologies that enable communication between software: if you are interested in learning more, you will find information in the Additional Topics section here.You will now look more closely at what happened when you executed the code in the previous lesson.代码示例lesson2_vb-net.zip (zip - 19Kb)lesson2_c-sharp.zip (zip - 23Kb)What does it mean to “build” code?The code that you typed in to Visual Basic Express in Lesson 1 was a set of human-readable instructions (source code) that needed to be converted into code that could be understood and executed by the computer. The “build” you performed did just that: it p ackaged up the resulting executable code inside a standard Windows EXE file. It’s also possible to create a DLL (Dynamic-Link Library) that can be loaded into Autodesk Inventor, but that’s a more advanced topic not covered by this guide.The following screenshot shows the output EXE along with the associated program debug database (which provides additional information when troubleshooting the EXE), once you have built the solution in Lesson 1 using Visual Basic Express. The path to which the EXE gets compiled is specified in the Visual Basic Express project settings and is set, by default, to the bin sub-folder of the Visual Basic Express project folder.Choosing a Programming Language and Development ToolJust as humans use different languages to communicate, you have various language options available to you when creating an Inventor plug-in: for the purposes of this guide we have chosen Visual Basic .NET (), a strong general-purpose programming language that is popular with Inventor developers.There are a number of tools available for developing code. They range from open source tools such as SharpDevelop to Microsoft’s flagship, professional development environment, Visual Studio. In your case you will be using Visual Basic Express, a free version of Visual Studio focused on building applications.Visual Basic Express is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) because it is composed of various tools, menus and toolbars which ease the creation and management of your code.The project system in Visual Basic Express comprises Solution and Project files as well as Project Items, the individual files belonging to projects.A solution is a container for one or more projects. Each project can inturn be considered a container for project items –such as source files, icons, etc. – most of which get compiled into the resultant executable file (EXE or DLL). Visual Basic Express provides a Solution Explorer that organizes and displays the contents of the loaded solution in a tree-view format:The Visual Basic Express interface also contains a text editor and an interface designer. These are displayed in the main window depending on the type of file being edited. The text editor is where you will enter the Visual Basic code for your Inventor plug-in. This editor provides advanced features such as IntelliSense and collapsible code sections along with the more classic text-editing features such as bookmarks and the display of line numbers.IntelliSense is an extremely valuable feature of the Visual Studio family that greatly improves programmer productivity: it automatically provides suggestions for the code being written based on the objects available and the letters that are being typed. IntelliSense showing the methods and properties for a ComponentOccurrence:Clearly one of the key features of Visual Basic Express is its ability to build code into an executable file. During the build process, the language compiler performs various checks and analyses on the code. One such check is to ensure the code conforms to the syntactical rules of the Visual Basic language. The compiler also performs various other checks, such as whether a variable has been appropriately defined or not. Detected errors are reported via the Error List Window, typically found at the bottom of the main window. The Error List can be displayed by selecting Error List from the View menu > Other Windows.The Visual in Visual Basic ExpressOne of the main strengths of Visual Basic Express is its set of tools for creating a User Interface. When you create a new project you can select a Windows Forms Application. When this template is used, the main window for the application is automatically created. This window is called a form and you can place user interface elements (called controls), such as a command buttons, on it. You add an element simply by selecting it in the Toolbox and then clicking and dragging it onto the Form. The Toolbox can be displayed using the View menu> Other Windows > Toolbox. Much of the code to make these elements work correctly gets added automatically to the project, greatly reducing the effort needed to get your application up and running.Reviewing your use of Visual Basic ExpressIn this section, you will create a blank project similar to the one you were provided in Lesson 1. This project will be the starting point for Lesson 3.1. Create a Windows Forms Application:Close the project from Lesson 1, if it is still open in Visual Basic Express, and then on the File menu, click New and then select New Project.This will open up a new dialog called New Project in which you have the option to select the template that will be used to create the plug-in application.As you are working with Visual Basic Express, your installed templates are under the Visual Basic category.In the center of the dialog, you can see various application templates that are available to you, the choice of which depends on the type of application you wish to create. As you‟re creating a simple, standalone EXE wit h a dialog-based user interface, select the “Windows Forms Application” template.You now need to select a name for your project. Enter MyFirstInventorPlug-in in the box near the bottom of the New Project dialog and select OK: The basicsolution containing your project should now be created and loaded into the Visual Basic Express editor.2. View the references:By default your blank project was created containing a few standard projectreferences to core .NET components. You can see these references byright-clicking the project in the Solution Explorer and selecting Properties. In the Properties window select References.Along with the standard references, a blank VB form is created and added to the project. It‟s this form that gets displayed in the text editor window, Form1.vb.Forms have two views, Design and Code: you can switch between the two views by right-clicking on Form1.vb in the Solution Explorer and selecting View Code or View Designer.3. Add references:So far you have created a blank Windows Forms Application project usingVisual Basic Express.This blank Windows Forms Application project, as created by Visual BasicExpress, does not automatically make use of the Inventor API. For it to do so, you need to add a project reference to the interface DLL in Inventor describing itsAPI, Autodesk.Inventor.Interop.dll.In the Solution Explorer, right-click the project and choose AddReference. Click the Browse tab in the Add Reference dialog and navigate to a location such as this beneath the installed location of Inventor on your system: o C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 201x\Bin\Public AssembliesSelect Autodesk.Inventor.Interop.dll and then OK.The Inventor API has now been referenced into your project.4. View Object Browser:Before proceeding further, let‟s use the Object Browser in Visual Basic Express.The object browser is a tool that can help you understand how to use the objects in the Inventor API. Once you have referenced the Inventor API(Autodesk.Inventor.Interop.dll) in your project its objects can be displayed in the Object Browser. The Object Browser is a dialog containing a tree showing how various components‟ objects are organized. As well as using the tree to browse the hierarchy, you can also search on the name of an object to access it directly.Once you have the object displayed and selected in the left pane of the tree view, you can see its methods and properties in the right pane. In the screenshot below,the Application object is selected in the left pane and its ActiveDocument property is selected in the right from among the object‟s various properties and methods.Try selecting other properties to see their details.Note:To display the Object Browser go to the View menu and select it. If “Object Browser” is not available on the View Menu then go to the Tools Menu, click on “Settings” and then select “Expert Settings”. Also by default the function key “F2”will display the Object Browser. (In both Expert and Basic settings).5. Ready to add Inventor API code:You‟re now ready to use the Inventor API by entering code in Visual Basic Express.In other words, to provide instructions telling Inventor how to perform certaintasks.6. Build the project:While developing code, it‟s a good idea to build the solution, from time to time, to check whether errors have been introduced in the code. The code does notnecessarily have to be complete or functional when building the solution. Thisapproach can help avoid potentially lengthy troubleshooting once the code iscomplete, and has the side benefit of automatically saving any edited source files before the build starts.To build a solution inside Visual Basic Express, select Build <ProjectName> from the Debug pull-down menu.Tip: As a shortcut, you can use the Function key …F6‟ to directly build the solutionwithout accessing the menu.If the build was successful, you will see Build Succeeded in the status bar at the bottom-left corner of the Visual Basic Express interface.7. Save the file:On the File menu, click Save All. Saving the solution creates physical filesrepresenting the contents of your class library project on your computer‟s harddrive, allowing you to open and edit it at another time in the future.A quick recap: in this lesson you took a brief look at what happens when you build a project, as well as some background information on and Visual Basic Express. You then spent some time creating a brand new Windows Forms Application project in Visual Basic Express, adding the required project reference for it to be able to use the Inventor API.Additional TopicsVisual Basic Express vs. Visual Studio ProfessionalIn this guide, you are using Visual Basic Express. This is a free version of Visual Studio and a great tool to help you start writing and managing Visual Basic code for your Inventor plug-in without the need for an additional software investment. Microsoft has targeted the Express editions of Visual Studio at students, hobbyists and other part-time programmers. While they provide most of the features of Visual Studio Professional, such as IntelliSense, they do have certain limitations. For instance, Visual Basic Express contains fewer project templates and has limited options for debugging and troubleshooting your code. If you are serious about plug-in development beyond this introductory guide, we recommend investing in one of the more fully-featured members of the Visual Studio product family.What is COM?“Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) technology in the Microsoft Windows-family of Operating Systems enables software components to communicate. COM is used by developers to create re-usable software components, link components together to build applications, and take advantage of Windows services. COM objects can be created with a variety of programming languages. Object-oriented languages, such as C++, provide programming mechanisms that simplify the implementation of COM objects.” Source: MSDN LibraryCOM is the underlying API technology used by older versions of Visual Basic, including Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). While some Windows application developers have exposed .NET interfaces to their software, others have continued to invest in their COM interfaces, as these can also be called from .NET applications (see below for further information).What is .NET?The .NET Framework is a software framework that sits on top of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system* and provides the underlying platform, libraries and services for all .NET applications. The services generally include memory management, garbage collection, common type system, class libraries, etc.* Subsets of .NET are also available on other operating systems, whether via the open source Mono project or via Micr osoft® Silverlight®, but these are not topics for this guide: you will focus solely on the use of .NET in the context of Microsoft Windows.What does the .NET Framework Contain?The framework contains two main components:1. Common Language Runtime (CLR)–This is the agent (or execution engine) inthe .NET Framework responsible for managing the execution of code. Which iswhy code written to target this runtime is also known as managed code. Allmanaged code runs under the supervision of the CLR, but what does this mean?The CLR manages code by providing core services such as memory management(which includes automatically releasing the computer‟s memory for reuse on othertasks when it is no longer needed), error (or exception) handling, managing theuse of multiple threads of execution and ensuring rules around the use of differenttypes of object are adhered to. The CLR is really the foundation of the .NETFramework.2. .NET Framework Class Library–As the name suggests, this is a library orcollection of object types that can be used from your own code whendeveloping .NET applications. These .NET applications are targeted for Windows(whether command-prompt based or with a graphical user interface), the web ormobile devices. This library is available to all languages using the .NETFramework.As mentioned above, the CLR improves code robustness by making sure the executing code conforms to a common type system (CTS). The CTS ensures that all .NET (or managed) code – irrespective of the language – uses a similar set of object types and can work together in the same environment. It is this feature that makes it possible for you to write applications in the development language of your choice and yet make use of components/code written by programmers using other .NET languages.Building ExecutablesWhen you built your code into an EXE, it was compiled into Common Intermediate Language (CIL – also known as MSIL) code using the language-specific compiler. CIL is a CPU-independent set of instruction that can be executed by the CLR on Windows operating systems. CIL is typically portable across 32- and 64-bit systems and even –to some extent –to non-Windows operating systems. The CIL code generated from your VBsource code was then packaged into a .NET assembly. Such an assembly is a library of CIL code stored in Portable Executable (PE) format (which contains both the CIL and its associated metadata). Assemblies can either be process assemblies (EXEs) or library assemblies (DLLs).During the course of this guide, you will focus on developing a particular type of Inventor plug-in: a process assembly (EXE) which communicates with Inventor. Because of the overhead associated with developing them, you will not spend time looking at Inventor AddIns, which are usually library assemblies (DLLs) that get loaded into and executed within the memory space of Inventor. One reason that implementing an EXE to work with Inventor is simpler than developing an AddIn is related to its user interface: Executables do not need to integrate seamlessly with the Inventor user interface by adding ribbon buttons (for instance).Running ExecutablesDuring execution of a .NET assembly, CIL(residing in the assembly) is passedthrough the CLR’s just-in-time (JIT)compiler to generate native (ormachine) code. JIT compilation of theCIL to native code occurs when theapplication is executed. As not all ofthe code is required during execution,the JIT compiler only converts the CILwhen it is needed, thus saving time andmemory. It also stores any generatedcode in memory, making it available forsubsequent use without the need torecompile.In the last step of this process, thenative code gets executed by thecomputer’s proce ssor.If you would like more details on theprocess of building .NET applications,please refer to the MSDN Library.课程3：深入解释课程1里出现的InventorAPI相关代码，帮助了解相关对象示例代码lesson3_vb-net.zip (zip - 24Kb)lesson3_c-sharp.zip (zip - 24Kb)Add code to the project you created in Lesson 2In Lesson 2 you created a project and it referenced the Inventor API via Autodesk.Inventor.Interop.dll. Adding this reference to the Inventor API allows you to start using it in your project. In the following steps you will access the top level object in the API, the Inventor.Application object.1. Open Lesson 2 class library project:Open the project you created in Lesson 2 and type the following lines of code tothe Form1.vb code window (above “Public Class Form1”). You can display thecode window by right-clicking on Form1.vb in the Solution Explorer andselecting View Code. To make room for the code, place the cursor to the left ofPublic Class and press the Enter key a few times to add some blank lines at thetop of the code window.2.Imports System3.Imports System.Type4.Imports System.Activator5.Imports System.Runtime.InteropServicesImports InventorKeywordsWhen you look at the code above, one of the first things you‟ll notice is the coloring: for readability, Visual Basic Express changes the color of certain words in the code. Words highlighted in blue are known as keywords, which can only be used in certain situations. You would not be able to declare a variable named Imports, for instance, as it is reserved to mean something very specific.NamespacesThe first few lines of code start with the Imports keyword. When working with different components and APIs in your Visual Basic project, it‟s quite common for classes to share the same name - there might be multiple versions of the Point class in different libraries, for instance. To avoid naming conflicts, .NET provides。