A Visual Studio solution might contain more than one ETO Design Library (Inventor or Custom Host) project. The Intent search path is set from one of those ETO Design Library projects.
In ETO Studio, this project is called the search path project. The intent compiler recognizes the designs in the search path and are displayed in the Design Navigator. Functions and the Function Navigator behave similarly.
You can edit a design not found in the search path, however, full ETO Studio functionality is not available for your design. When you save the file, it is not compiled so compilation errors cannot be viewed.
Several ETO projects in a solution make it likely that you prefer some library projects to be included in the search path of your higher-level projects.
For Inventor projects, you can include other projects in the search path. There is no UI for including such projects in ETO Studio, but you can do it with the Inventor ETO Project Editor in Inventor. You can also edit the text of the Inventor project (IPJ) file in Visual Studio.
For Custom Host projects, you can edit the IntentHost.config file to include other projects in the search path.
By default, the search path project is the startup project. You can set the startup project by right-clicking on the project in the Solution Explorer and selecting Set as StartUp Project. You might be working in a mixed solution that includes C#, VB.NET, or other types of projects in addition to Intent.
To change the default: Set the search path project independently by selecting the Set as Search Path project command on the context menu. This command is also available on the Project menu in the menu bar. After this process, you are able to make a non-Intent project your new startup project.
There is a separate context menu command on the User Designs node in the Design Navigator. This command shows all the search path options: The StartUp Project, or the dedicated search path project.
If you start debugging with an Intent project as the startup project, the search path project in ETO Studio automatically sets to that project. This auto setting is done to ensure the search paths in both the ETO Studio process and the process being debugged are the same.