Creating a new footprint that displays subassemblies on BOM

[Anonymous]

So I have been tasked to create an operator's station with four pushbuttons within an enclosure, then have the BOM display the parent component as well as the child components as subassemblies.

I learned through the forums that you cannot have a subassembly from the PB table attached to a parent component from the EN table, if I understood correctly.  This doesn't seem very sensical to me. 

Q1: Shouldn't there be a system in place to allow an enclosure to have subassemblies attached to it from different tables? The multiple catalog method is the next best method that I know of, and this never saves the information to the component for later use.

Right now, I have managed to successfully attach the subassembly pushbuttons to the enclosure using the Multiple Catalog method.  Because the layout still has the enclosure footprint, along with the four pushbutton footprints, the BOM displays each pushbutton as separate entities AND the enclosure with the pushbutton sub assemblies.

Q2:  Is there a way to create a footprint of this enclosure depicted with the various pushbuttons, drop it into the drawing, and then have the BOM still display the subassemblies underneath the parent component?

The components I'm using are as follows:

Parent: E4PB (EN)

Subs:  800T-FX6A1 (PB)

800T-D9A (PB)

800T-QA24W (PB)

800T-A1A (PB)

I've attached a screen shot of the current BOM display where I used the Mutliple Catalog method.

Thanks for your time.

[Icemanau]

I've come across the same problem when trying to link a fuse in the FU table to a M205 teminal fuse holder in the TRMS table. I got around it by adding the required fuseholder components to the FU table as sub components.

With your problem, I would insert the footprint of the enclosure and then add the footprints for the pushbuttons as seperate components on top of the footprint of the enclosure.

You end up with 5 footprints instead of one, but the footprints for the PB's can be linked to the PB block in the schematic as normal.

Regards Brad

[dougmcalexander]

Try inserting attributes MFG01, CAT01, MFG02, CAT02, etc. into your footprint. Load the values of these attributes with the MFG and CAT data for the subassemblies. You can add up to MFG99 and CAT99. The will appear as Multiple Catalog entries, if you edit the footprint and click Multiple Catalog. If you add Multiple Catalog entries by editing a component AutoCAD Electrical actually pushes the data into the symbol as extended entity data (xdata). But you can pre-load a footprint with the attributes so that each time the footprint is inserted you automatically get the Multiple Catalog parts as well. Hint: The original Symbol Builder actually prompts you to insert these optional attributes, after you insert the master MFG and CAT attributes. You can explode the footprint on the drawing and use the command WD_SYM_BUILD to call up the original Symbol Builder. Note: While this may not solve the cross-table issue, it will at least save you from having to create the subassembly manually by editing the footprint after it is inserted and add the Multiple Catalog entries.