Item number in BOM with Phantom assemblies

[dominiek_vanwest]

Hi,

I made an assembly (A) which contains a few subassemblies (B) who are 'Phantom'. Those subassemblies (B) contain a few other assemblies and parts (C).

In the top assembly (A) I renumbered (in the BOM) those assemblies and parts (C) starting with the number 101 (As subassemblies B are Phantom I only see the assemblies and parts C which I can give a number).

Now I want to make a drawing of the subassembly B, but with the same Item numbers from assembly A (now they are numbered 1,2,.... instead of 101,102,...)

Is there a way to make the BOM from subassembly B have the same Item number (for the same assembly/part) as in the BOM from top assembly A without having to manually do it? I want to link it in some way as if my top assembly changes, I'd like the subassemblies to change too.

Thanks in advance,

Dominiek

[coreyparks]

I think the only way to keep it parametric would be to insert a view of A outside the border and create a partslist from that.  You can then turn the visibility off of all the parts you don't want to see, not always the easiest to do.  Other than that it would be manually renumber all the items in the BOM to match whats in the main assembly.  Thankfully in our drawing A only item numbers for the subassemblies themselves, not the child parts, shows on the drawing.  All the subssembly parts have their own drawings with unique item numbers.

[dominiek_vanwest]

That's not really an option as in my assembly I have a few thousand subassemblies.

Manually renumber the items is not an option either. Half of the time there are changes so I want everything to change immediately too.

Simply said, the thing I want to make, you can compare with building a tower out of lego blocks and I want to make a drawing for layer 1, layer 2, ...., layer n. If I keep everything in one assembly I can do it with a section view on each layer (with section distance very small so I only see that layer), copy that drawing, and move the section line up. The problem with this is that all the balloons turn pink as they are not attached to any lego block anymore, so I have to manually reattach the arrow point of the balloon to a lego block, and sometimes I have 100-150 balloons for each layer, and sometimes up to 20-25 layers. I also need to manually change the parts list to show only the items (and the amount) for the balloons that are in that layer, which makes this all time consuming and incredibely boring 🙂

If I make an assembly for each layer, I can copy the drawing for 1 layer, and in the drawing just replace the assembly for layer 1 (via Manage -> Replace Model Reference) with the assembly for another layer. The balloons are now ok and also the parts list is correct, which makes it much faster. But the only problem here is the item numbers as I said in my opening post. The items get a new number for each layer, which means it is possible that the same lego block has a different item number for layer 1 and layer 2.

[-niels-]

I've seen more topics about this sort of thing, and what i always wonder is: why does it matter so much what item number is on the "other" drawing?
If you see each assembly as a separate thing and make a partlist specific for that drawing then everything should be fine.
An item number should not be the identifier for the part, you have partnumber or stocknumber for that (or whatever iproperty you decide to store a part's specific identifier under.)

If it's really important to keep the same item number over a number of drawings, then i'd probably use the highest level assembly and make design views for the sub-assemblies so i could filter the partlist on those design views.
Yes, you'd have to use the master assembly on each drawing and that might take a lot of memory/time/performance and yes, there might be some quantity issues but so be it...

I just see an item number as a reference number, which can change very easily unlike it's partnumber.

---edit---

I just gave another topic the suggestion to maybe look into ilogic to copy ITEM number to a custom iproperty, that might lead to a possible solution.

[dominiek_vanwest]

It's because our "lego blocks" part number consists of a lot of numbers (25) which indicate how that block looks like.

(For extra information, we build silo's that are constructed like lego blocks).

Using that large part number to balloon is not an option, so therefore we use the item number. That item number is per project also stamped in to the lego block. That means for every layer I need the same item number for the same part number.

Maybe your solution with the Design Views is an option. I'll try that. Though like you say it will take a lot of memory/performance.

[-niels-]

wow, 25 number... that's long indeed!

For good measure, i wouldn't have used that number in the balloon either.
It's just that, in my opinion, there should be a partlist associated to the specific assembly so you can lookup the item number and see which partnumber it is.

At our company we used to have a system where we used a custom property, that we filled by hand, as the item number.
This caused us a lot of issues when we used such a part in another machine where the same number already existed, because that "item" number was just a shortened version of our "stock-number" which in turn was derived from it's partnumber.
At some point i pointed this out and said that it might be easier to just let inventor handle the item numbers with it's built in function and sort our partlists on the "stock number".
This was implemented and we've been very happy with it since.
It's also why i get frustrated sometimes when seeing these topics where people need another static value to identify parts with, though i can imagine it's very company specific since we don't work with "projects".

So i do hope you get to a good solution and sorry if my frustration showed in my previous post.
(also, look into the ilogic suggestion as well, there's a world of possibilities there...)

[dominiek_vanwest]

Well, it's not that I want a new static value. I want to link the item number from 1 assembly (layer 1, layer 2,....) to the top assembly (where all the layers are in. (Don't forget the layers are Phantom, so in the BOM in Structured tab I don't see those layers, but only the lego blocks that are in those layers)

But as item number is only for the assembly itself, that's probably not possible.

[dominiek_vanwest]

Making Design Views is not an option. Just tried it, but if I change the view, the balloons disappear.

[ryanrileywelding]

This is 3 months old, but I think you may be looking for the same thing I have been.

What I've found is to create a new property in the BOM called "Mark" (or whatever you want).  Do this in the 'Parts Only' tab.  Then copy your ITEM number into the new column "Mark".  When you save the assembly, the "Mark" property is added to the iProperties of the parts in the assembly.  

Then in your drawings, change the ballons to reference the "Mark" property.  That way it does not matter if you create a parts list on each page, the balloon is referencing the iproperty from the part, not the assembly.  (This poses a problem.  See Below).  Also, you will need to add the custom property "Mark" in your parts list.  Make sure it is spelled the same and has the same capitalization as the one in your assembly.

The problems that arise with doing it this way is if you use the same parts for multiple assemblies.  Everytime you change the "Mark" property in the assembly it will overwrite the previous property.  Another issue, is that it's manual, meaning that you have to manually copy the BOM ITEM property into your new "Mark" property.  If you produce mostly unique parts as my company does, then this is not such an issue.

[dominiek_vanwest]

Well, that's the problem, we use a number of parts for most of the projects, so we can't use that method.

Some projects run simultanious which would even make it worse 🙂