CAD Software Questions & Answers

No, you cannot delete or toggle visibility of parts or subassemblies using Apprentice Server alone. Apprentice is a read-only API designed for lightweight access to Inventor files, perfect for extracting metadata, geometry, BOMs, and iProperties, but not for modifying model structure or visual states.

Select Text with Mouse + Keyboard

• Click and drag to highlight the code in the Help window
• Press Ctrl + C to copy it
• Then go to your VBA editor and press Ctrl + V to paste

No, Apprentice Server in Inventor 8 does not support modifying part parameters. It provides read-only access to many aspects of Inventor documents, including geometry, B-Rep, and document properties, but editing model parameters is not part of its capabilities.

The lockfile.lck sticking around after your app closes is usually a sign that something didn’t fully release its grip on the file system even if you’ve set all your object variables to Nothing.

Yes, both Degrees of Freedom (DOF) and the Engineer’s Notebook are accessible to varying degrees through the Inventor API, though they live in different corners of the object model and come with their own quirks.

No, you cannot use empty parts with the same name and force the assembly to point to this version with apprentice.

To create a new SplitFeature using Inventor API you can use the SplitFeatures.SplitBody or SplitFeatures.SplitFaces methods.

To get the prefix of a General Dimension Tolerance object in Autodesk Inventor using the API, you can access it through the Text property of the GeneralDimension object. However, the prefix itself (like a plus/minus symbol or custom text before the dimension value) is part of the formatted string, not a separate property.

Unfortunately, Inventor does not currently support changing the text color of the X, Y, and Z axes in the browser to match their on-screen arrow colors (red for X, green for Y, blue for Z)

Yes, Inventor’s API does support adding a custom table to a drawing that references an Excel file  and it’s surprisingly straightforward once you know the method.