This is an unofficial collection of extension APIs for Autodesk Inventor. The goal is to present developers and iLogic users with the following:

• Code that promises to be routinely and consistently useful,
• Additional API functionality that is not included in Inventor's public APIs, or
• Improved functionality of stock API objects/methods. This may include:
  • simplified access to API objects, functions, and values,
  • functions designed to reduce boilerplate code,
  • more advanced management of API objects, and
  • better error handling outcomes. E.g. an example is an iproperty access method that will not throw an exception when a non-present property is accessed.

The minimum supported version of Inventor will be 2020.

API Documentation can be found at InventorShims API Docs. The source files for these documents are located in /docs/.

First off, you'll want to get or build a copy of the InventorShims.dll file, or (or advanced users) extract whatever source code you want. There are several ways to do this:

1. By visiting the Releases page, downloading the compiled InventorShims.dll file to your computer, and referencing it in your Inventor iLogic or add-in code. This will allow you to access the entirety of the InventorShims API.
2. By cloning this repo and building the dll yourself.
3. By installing the (forthcoming) nuget package for use in Visual Studio.
4. By copying out the methods, classes, or modules that are useful and including those in your own vb or C# code-base.
5. By using the code in this package as reference material and examples to build your own solution.

• For iLogic, add the following code in your iLogic rule header:

  AddReference "C:\Path\To\File\InventorShims.dll"
  Imports InventorShims
  
  'Add your code here, include InventorShims API functions as you need...

• For add-in development, add the InventorShims.dll as a reference to your project.

• Visit the InventorShims API Documentation for a more detailed guide.

At this time there are two languages in this repo - vb.net and c#. Each resides within a seperate project within the Visual Studio solution. These two projects are built and merged into a single dll resource file by post-build hooks in the visual studio solution.

Contributions of any type are welcome! If you want to help...

• Please drop into issues and see if there are any outstanding ones that you would like to tackle.
• Add any issues you want and we can discuss.
• Fork the code and add some functionality!

If you want to contribute, the process proceeds as follows:

1. fork the repo
2. create a new feature branch in your forked repo
3. make changes
4. commit your work
5. then issue a pull request back to this repo (upstream) for a code review.

Master will be the main repository branch; this branch will contain the most up-to-date code. All short-lived branches will be merged back into Master after a code review by repo maintainers.

release will be utilized as the release branch. Releases will be tagged and binary builds added into github as a Release. Long term support releases may be supported in the future; if implementated, they will each reside in a release/v#.#.# branch.

The following branch names are suggested for short-lived branches...

• feature/xx
• bugfix/xx
• issue/xx
• username/xx

• Visual Studio Compatible IDE
• .Net 4.7 (for Inventor 2020 support)
• ILMerge nuget package
• Inventor 2020 SDK installation (minimum)

Versioning will follow Sematic Versioning. The version numbers will follow the format MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH where:

• MAJOR - incompatible API changes
• MINOR - added functionality in a backwards compatible manner
• PATCH - backwards compatible bug fixes

This code is under an MIT license.