References
See the files a document depends on - an assembly's parts, a drawing's model - as an interactive graph.
Inventor documents point at other files: an assembly references its parts and sub-assemblies, a drawing references the model it documents. The References tab draws those relationships as a graph you can explore.
Exploring the graph
- The document you opened is the highlighted node on the left; the files it references branch off to the right.
- Click the + / − on any node to expand or collapse its children.
- Click a referenced document to open it in its own tab and keep drilling down.
- Right-click a node for more: Open in a tab, or Show in Explorer to reveal that file on disk. Show in Explorer works for any found file - including linked images and imported CAD that can't be opened as a document.
- Drag the background to pan; scroll to zoom.
- The toolbar in the top-right corner has icon buttons (hover for the name): Fit to zoom the whole graph into view, Expand all / Collapse all, Show thumbnails to draw each node with its document's preview image, and Fullscreen to blow the graph up to the whole screen (Esc exits).
MetaReader resolves each reference on disk - first next to the parent file, then by name anywhere in the project folder - so a project that's been copied or reorganized still maps correctly. A file that can't be found is shown but marked as missing (and can't be revealed in Explorer).
iParts: factory & members
An iPart is a single part - the factory - that generates many configured members from a table; in an assembly each placed member references its factory. MetaReader recognizes both and highlights them in the graph:
- iPart members carry a gold "iPart member" label.
- Their shared iPart factory is drawn with a gold border and an "iPart factory" label, wherever it appears.
This makes it easy to tell table-driven copies of a factory apart from standalone parts - for example
a set of Front Compression Fan-01…04 members all pointing at one Front Compression Fan factory.
Version & provenance
Below the graph, the Version / provenance panel collects the same version history Windows Explorer shows on a file's Details tab - Current, Previous and Next Version, who last saved it and with which Inventor build - followed by where the file came from: the Inventor file and software schema, when and from what it was saved, and the originating template. It's a quick way to see what produced a file and roughly which Inventor version touched it last.
Explorer's Created with and Needs Migrating fields aren't shown: Inventor computes them on the fly (from an internal build table and the version opening the file) rather than storing them, so there's no value to read back without Inventor running.