"The current Design View Representation is locked. Changes against it will not be saved." appears when saving an Inventor file

Autodesk Support

Dec 12, 2024

Products and versions covered

Issue:

When attempting to save an Inventor part or assembly file that you’ve changed, you see the following message:

The current Design View Representation is locked and the changes you made to the Representation will not be saved. If you want to keep those changes, click Cancel and create a new Design View Representation or unlock the current one. To continue and discard edits made to the locked Representation, click OK.

Error message shows in Inventor
Example of error message in Inventor

You also see a lock icon in front of the name of the part you’re trying to revise:

Error message for the representation view

Causes:

When a design view representation is locked, you cannot save changes to any of the following design view elements in it:

Assembly elements:

Component visibility (visible or not visible)
Component transparency
Sketch feature visibility if the visibility state is controlled by the Object Visibility command. (It does not capture the visibility state if the sketch is turned on or off in the browser)
Work feature visibility (visible or not visible)
Component selection status (enabled or not enabled)
Appearance and style characteristics applied in the assembly
Zoom magnification
Viewing angle
Part view representations

Part elements:

Body appearance
Sketch visibility
Sketch block visibility
Work feature visibility
UCS visibility
Browser expansion state
Zoom magnification
Viewing angle

Solution:

While working in the Assembly environment:

The solution depends upon whether or not you want to keep the overrides you made to one or more of the assembly or part elements listed above.

If you don’t want to keep overrides you made, simply click OK in the message dialog box. The overrides will not be stored in the active view, but any geometry changes will be saved.

Note: A selected checkbox indicates the active design view, as for “RedCubes” in the example below.

If you do want to keep overrides you made, click Cancel in the message dialog box. You need to unlock the design view or create a new one in which to save your overrides:

Note: The “Master” view is always locked and can’t be unlocked or deleted. Thus, elements in the Master view cannot be overridden. If the Master view is active, you must either create a new design view or activate an unlocked design view in which to save your changes:

To add new view Activate the view

To learn more about design views, view the Autodesk Virtual Academy video, Design Views in Inventor.

While working in the Part environment:

In Part model environment, The prompt appears because the graphical section view is considered a Design View override. The Primary (Master) Design View is always locked, and the override cannot be saved.
To resolve this, you can change your template so that the locked view is not the default. Instead, work in the views that can be unlocked to prevent this issue from occurring.

Products:

Inventor Products;

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