Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

We are looking for a way to export BOM's without having to open individual IDW's.

We were unable to find such a function in either Inventor or Vault Workgroup. We have found customized function for export but each file has to be opened. Is there such a function available that we might have missed or third party?

We are currently working with 2011 versions of Inventor and Vault Workgroup, soon to be migrated to 2013.

Thank you.

[#2]

A .net solution using Inventor Apprentice may work.

[#3]

There are plenty of solutions that won't require you to manually open your files, but the program or application will still be opening the files in the background. The best solution is a stand-alone application I've found.

[#4]

Thank you for the response, would you happen to have examples or names of stand-alone applications? We dont mind if they all have to be opened by the program as long as we do not have to manually open them ourselves.

Here is a bit more detail on what we are trying to do.

We are working with assemblies composed of +/- 2500 total parts. From the main assembly we extract the BOM. from here we would like to feed this list to an application/function to gather all sub-assembly BOM's associated to the project and create related parts list files (ie:xls,csv, etc...)

[#5 · Accepted solution]

Have you tried to just export the bom (all levels) to excel from the top level assembly..

You don't need to open any of the subassemblies at all that way.. You get the complete indented BOM.

[#6]

Hi documentation,

As mcgyvr suggested, you can get the entire assembly from the top level model.

If you're looking to automate it from there, you can use something like the snippet posted here:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor-Customization/Recurssive-BOM/m-p/3507166#M38941

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[#7]

BOMxTrator works from outside the Inventor enviroment as well. Can be found on the cbliss.com website

[#8 · Accepted solution]

I understand you want to export  the BOM from the drawing but drawings may contain multiple parts lists.

If you don't mind exporting the BOM directly from the assemblies, another thought is to use some iLogic code and wrap this up in a Task Scheduler custom task.

If you unzip attached 2013 files in a folder called c:\test, start Inventor and follow the instructions from this blog post (the post uses a different iLogic rule but the principles remain the same), you will see two Excel files with BOM info show up in the c:\test folder after running the custom task. Use the exe in attached zip (not the one from the blog post).

The names of the assemblies you are interested in need to be stored in myfiles.csv and can be customized to your needs. The ilogic code that I used can be found in Externalrule.txt.

Bob

[#9]

The procedure works great, what I would like to know is how to edit the external rule file such that it outputs to a given excel template.

For example columns Part #, Description, Material, QTY with the columns fit to width. I found some similar commands in the boards but have not managed to get them to work.

Thanks in advance

[#10 · Accepted solution]

If you want particular columns in a particular position, it is still possible to use my proposed technique but you will have to code considerably more. There is an API Example available that explains how to do custom BOM columns..

Search with the keyword "BOMquery" in the API Help.

It is quite easy to convert VBA code to iLogic code. The conversion typically consists in dropping the "Set" and "Sub"

statements and providiing the proper Inventor enum statements.

Bob