Getting properties from Inventor in Powershell and integrating with FZF

For a few years now i have been a so called ‘fzf power user’, with how painfully slow and buggy Microsofts latest iteration of File Explorer is on Windows 11 i reached for a little known tool called (fzf), It is incredibly fast even on NTFS network drives and has allowed me to many times find files that other people thought were lost to the void of 9 layer deep organisational folder structuring.

Inventor Object Model

Inventor has a interop DLL file which exposes all of the interfaces shown above. It is similar to how Microsoft office COM API’s work. The indended use case is for writing C# tooling that can interface with the library. But with the might of Powershell we can actually just interact with the interop dll with a simple script

All we have to do is the following

• Use Add-Type to load the assembly into our contect
• Call New-Object to create an instance of the COM Object
• Open the given file with the object.
• Go nuts!

Add-Type -Path ("C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Autodesk.Inventor.Interop\v4.0_25.0.0.0__d84147f8b4276564\Autodesk.Inventor.Interop.dll") # Not sure how this path is generated or exported 
$Server = New-Object -ComObject Inventor.ApprenticeServer
$File = $Server.Open("G:\1-Engineering\1-Bowers\CAD System\Production CAD\Air Gauging\Air Snap\87-17-1.ipt")
$Props = $File.PropertySets

$DTP = $Props.Item("Design Tracking Properties") # These are the default IPropeties Associated with Inventor