By Adam Nagy
Couple of changes in Inventor 2017:
1) Digitally signed add-in
Inventor 2017 provides a new way of making an add-in load without the security dialog popping up: the add-in dll needs to be digitally signed with a certificate ...
... and the publisher of the certificate needs to be in the "Trusted Publishers" list:
This is something that could be done by your app's installer - e.g. the installer provided for App Store plugins will do it as well if your add-in is digitally signed.
You can follow the same procedures as in case of signing any other files, including an AutoCAD add-in:
http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2015/01/digitally-signing-plug-in-files.html
Here is also an article listing a few digital certificate providers:
http://adndevblog.typepad.com/manufacturing/2015/04/do-you-want-to-load-this-add-in.html
2) AddInLoadRules in Inventor 2017
"AddInLoadRules.xml" files were introduced in Inventor 2016 and are used to track which add-ins should be allowed to load:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/troubleshooting/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Inventor-Install/files/GUID-84B221D3-979B-420D-B955-9DCBDC0C5619-htm.html
Inventor 2017 is still using AddInLoadRules files with some changes compared to Inventor 2016. In Inventor 2017 we have the following files:
- Administrator settings are stored in an xml file "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2017\Preferences\AddInLoadRules.xml"
- User override settings are now stored in a binary file "%APPDATA%\Autodesk\Inventor 2017\Addins\AddInLoadRules"
- If the user hasn’t saved any overrides, that binary file won’t exist yet
- Additionally, since in prior releases the user override settings were in an xml file, we still honour those settings if that file is present - but only if the binary file is not present
- Once user makes a change and save their settings, the new binary file is created
