Vault Professional: Cannot Assign Item to Inventor Assembly

Issue:

In Vault Professional you are unable to assign an Item to an Inventor Assembly file.  This happens to specific assembly files, but not all assemblies are affected or exhibit the same behavior.  When attempting to assign an Item to the problem assembly you do not receive any errors or failures, and any subcomponents/parts included will received their Item assignment without issue. 

 

However, if you select the problem assembly, and choose either “Go To Item” or “Open Item”,

you will receive the error below:

You also are unable to assign the assembly to an existing Item except as an attachment (see below):

Causes:

The source of this issue is in the BOM settings for the problem assembly, inside of Inventor.  If an assembly is set to the “Phantom” BOM Status as shown below, both Inventor and Vault will treat the assembly as a modeling only tool, and will ignore the assembly with regards to any BOM related task/assignment:

Solution:

The solution to this issue is changing the “BOM Structure” setting for the problem assembly file to one of the BOM designations that are calculated by the BOM as shown below:

Once the change above is made and the file is checked back into Vault, you will now be able to assign an Item to the assembly as shown below:

For a better understanding of BOM Structure in Inventor, please see the following article and recording from our Ascent and Manufacturing Solutions Blog:

https://blogs.rand.com/manufacturing/2020/04/understanding-bill-of-materials-structure-in-inventor.html

https://resources.imaginit.com/videos-webcasts/tips-tricks-for-working-with-bill-of-materials-boms-in-inventor

https://blogs.rand.com/ascent/2017/06/a-5-step-guide-to-working-with-bills-of-materials-in-autodesk-vault-professional.html

 

About the Author

Heath White

Sr. Technical Support Specialist, Manufacturing

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