Two of the most under used and misunderstood application options are related to assembly constraints. How many times have you inherited someone else’s assembly file and spent hours trying to unravel their constraint scheme?
Enter the options, ‘constraint redundancy analysis’ and ‘constraint failure analysis’.
Constraint redundancy analysis will analyze for duplicate constraints applied within your assembly. The redundant constraints will be marked in your browser for your information. This is not considered an error, just a means to diagnose your constraints to a deeper level.
Constraint failure analysis will analyze for conflicting constraints. Normally, when this option is turned off a conflicting constraint that is applied will highlight as an error but will not show you which other constraint is it in conflict with. When this option is on, it will highlight all of the constraints that conflict with one another.
It’s important to remember that having these options turned on, especially when working with large assemblies will require Inventor to perform more checks than normal when applying constraints and will result in slightly slower performance. It is considered a best practice to turn these options on only when required. I’d like to hear your comments on how you use these options.