So, now that I showed the available options and how they did not meet my needs, let me state what I want to do and what I came up with using the Inventor API. And new files (which are probably going to happen in a copied design) will have to be named correctly during design, which is not always possible under an ERP system. The problem is, you need to have the new names beforehand. It does what it’s supposed to do: Copies a design and renames the files.

Using the CopyDesign add-in sample from Inventor SDK: This is an example piece of software that comes with the Inventor API SDK.

Sometimes it hurts productivity even more as the files are organized according to the tree, so finding them is another issue. You still have to do the renaming manually. Imagine you as a designer already having the old-new naming correlations in an Excel table, but unable to paste them in Design Assistant.

Using the Design Assistant: This tool is nice, but there is a missing functionality that keeps it from being something usable for large assemblies: One cannot paste a table in the treeview.

At least you can print the correlation table from Excel. You relieve the pain of renaming the files one by one, but the relinking still needs to be done manually in Inventor.

Excel VBA to rename files: This is a little bit less cumbersome.

Apart from renaming the files one by one, you have to keep track of the old-new name correlations so when you open the assemblies in Inventor, you can redo the links manually.

Manual renaming in explorer: This is a pain in the ***.Well, there are many ways of doing this, but I found that all the built-in ways in Autodesk Inventor have some sort of caveat: Even higher are the chances that you already had to rename all the files in a given assembly to match an ERP needs or a coding system needs. If you’re a mechanical designer for a living, chances are that you already had to copy an existing design. *Edit: New, translated, version posted on GitHub with install instructions.

Mass file renaming tool