iProperty Expressions

It’s easy to forget the expression within iProperties feature exists within Autodesk Inventor.
This works by first exporting the parameter by selecting the export checkbox from the parameters window. It’s helpful to first name the parameter you want to use something useful, like width, thickness, etc.

Next step is to open the iProperty editor window and build your expression. You do this as such:

When you click apply, the actual values will appear in place of the expressions for width and depth.
The property would then look something like:

Unfortunately, there is no real way to format how the parameters are displayed. You can’t change the number of decimal places or hide the units name. (I stand corrected, see comments.)
You can also combine iProperties:

As in the example above for the title field, you can insert the description property within the title property.

One major stumbling block to using expressions in iProperties is that if the property is edited outside the normal iProperty dialog window, there is no way to flag that the property contains an expression. Editing the value from Vault for example would destroy the expression unless you added it back as an expression. This can be tedious. It’s too bad you can’t lock the property to only allow an editable portion.

Next post I’ll cover advanced formulas within parameters.