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Autodesk Confidential Information January 2010
SheetMetal Styles from Inventor 2009
•Big changes from the 2009 release
•API could not maintain backward compatibility
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Inventor 2008
Inventor 2009
The concept of sheet metal styles has been radically changed with Inventor 2009.  The changes were big enough that we were unable to provide any compatibility with the previous API.  If you used sheet metal styles you’ll need to rewrite that portion of your code.

In Inventor 2008 there were sheet metal styles that encapsulated everything.  These were stored within the sheet metal document.  In Inventor 2009 the functionality of a sheet metal style has been broken up into three separate concepts; sheet metal rules, sheet metal unfold, and material thicknesses.  All of these are now stored as styles external to any sheet metal document, like all other styles.

The sheet metal rules are essentially the equivalent of the previous sheet metal style except some things have been removed.  The API still uses the SheetMetalStyle object to represent this information.  A major change was made because of the fact that these styles are now defined outside of a sheet metal document.  Previously, many of the settings returned Parameter objects that you would then use to set the desired value.  Now these values are stored as Strings, so the API reflects this.  The parameters that are set by the active style and drive the sheet metal part are now available on the SheetMetalComponentDefinition object.

Unfold methods are similar to before except they’re no longer associated with a sheet metal style but can be created and used independently of any style.

A big change in Inventor 2009 is how the thickness is specified.  You can now define thicknesses as part of the material definition.  Which styles to use is defined on the new “Sheet Metal Defaults” dialog.  There are properties that provide the equivalent of this dialog on the SheetMetalComponentDefinition object.