Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

This morning the shop brought back a set of drawings and requested that I provide a cut list for the fab department. Our drawings consist of an assemply drawing and materials list on the first page with several individual parts on each of the following pages. I am looking at including a column in the ML for the operation ( laser, saw, shear) and sorting the list by it. However when I do this the Item Numbers on the list are all confused. If a person were to look at a balloon on a drawing and then attempt to find it in the list it would be difficult and time waster.

The questions.

                        1. Is there a way to renumber the item list after sorting the material?

                        2. If I place an assembly view off the edge of the sheet for each of the following sheets and then place a materials list on each sheet, is it possible to create a plugin that would find which parts are on the sheet and hide all the other parts on the list? I have just started going through the "my first plugin" tutorial and this sounds like a place where it should be helpful but I don't know which tags I need to look for.

Thank you

[#2]

Best option - you can also renumber your parts in the BOM. All parts must be checked out first. Sort by your custom column then renumber.

As for 2, you can copy and paste the original parts list to other pages and change visibility of parts independently in each one. no need to place a base view on the paper space of each sheet. As for code to do it for you, if you find you can let me know

[#3]

DUH! I had looked at the other icons and missed the renumber one. I was sure I had done something like this before.

I would assume the question about the plugin is just as basic with an answer of  "sure you can as long as you can write 400 lines of code". And I type very slow. A plugin would be very desireable over sorting through a list of 60 parts and hiding all but about 10 of them for several pages.

Thank you

[#4]

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JimSteinmeyer wrote:

                        2. If I place an assembly view off the edge of the sheet for each of the following sheets and then place a materials list on each sheet, is it possible to create a plugin that would find which parts are on the sheet and hide all the other parts on the list? I have just started going through the "my first plugin" tutorial and this sounds like a place where it should be helpful but I don't know which tags I need to look for.

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Hi  JimSteinmeyer,

If you place the view off the sheet, then balloon only the items you want to show in the parts list, you can then use a Parts List filter to show only the ballooned items in the parts list.

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

[#5]

Am sure one of the Inventor guru's could do it and probably make some money doing so. I'd send em a cpl bucks for a good working one and so would a few hundred thousand other users I expect. Curtis's idea will work if you place a seperate base view for each page and ballon only those parts on that view. Again, time consuming and you still have to find the parts you placed to balloon them, which I expect I cld do faster just by hiding the others manually. Fixing to take some coding classes tho, check back in a few years , as like you I type very slow.

[#6]

SWhite, unfortunately we already send several thousand  maintence fee bucks to the ones who SHOULD make the BOM/parts list more user friendly anyway.

Curtus,

Thank you for the tip about the filters. I will use them for now. I am not sure I like putting a new parts list on each sheet, but I am not sure of a better way of creating a cut sheet for my fab department, and he doesn't like to flip from one page to the next.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

I believe you can export the parts list to excell and you could then provide a secondary cut list sheet to the shop yet allow the drawings to be sorted in a different order and not even contain the cut list data if desired..

[#8]

Yes, that might be one way of doing things. Probably one of the best ideas over all.

Thank you