Application Research of Secondary Development Technology for the Replacement of Furniture Part Based on Inventor API

Because of dissatisfaction with certain part of furniture model, the designers of furniture hope to replace that part with another one, and make the size of new one automatically adapt to the whole model. Inventor offers the function of replacement, but the size of the part which replaces the old one is not changed at all, so the replacing part size can not automatically adapt to the model. In this paper, we set up user defined parts of furniture and size parameters of furniture model in Inventor with the help of VB.NET, by calling API functions of Inventor and using technology of ADO data processing to modify Excel, so that the system replaces the part and updates its sizes to correspond with the sizes of the whole model automatically. How to design the parts of furniture to replace the dissatisfied parts automatically in Inventor is emphasized in this paper. The result shows that the secondary development of Inventor will be of a great value in construction of new furniture, improving design efficiency greatly.