topic Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box? in Inventor Forum

How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 14:43:03 GMT

In an inventor drawing, how do I refer to an item number in the bill of materials in a sentence?

That way if the BOM changes, the text box is automatically updated to the correct item number without having to hard type it in.

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

Mark.Lancaster — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:00:01 GMT

@Anonymous

Welcome to the Autodesk User's Community..

The only possible solution to this (outside of programming/ilogic) is to use the Inventor Technical requirements.

Reviewing this article https://synergiscadblog.com/2015/10/30/inventor-technical-requirements/ and the information at the end of the article where that workflow is covered.

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:25:39 GMT

Annotate ribbon I get, but ESKD tab? where is it?

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

Mark.Lancaster — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:29:45 GMT

@Anonymous

As the article indicates you need to load the related add-in (while in the drawing)

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

NigelHay — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 13:47:29 GMT

That seemed like a brilliant idea so I activated the ESKD support. It's easy to create notes but the appear in a weird typeface & I can't see any way of changing it. I also realised that, once activated, ESKD hijacks the standard leader notes & makes them Technical Requirements, they also display in a strange way so I ended up turning off ESKD. I've gone back to our previous method of having a drawing with all of our standard notes which get copied & pasted into other drawings.

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 13:53:21 GMT

I was able to change the style of the typeface in the notes to conform with the rest of my drawing.

However, I did end up turning it off as well, because I could not figure out how to change the typeface of my Datum references once placed.

Also, you can only refer to an Item number if it is ballooned on the page you are putting the note. I always put my notes on page 1, with the BOM where there are no balloons so it really wasn't working the way I wanted it to anyway.

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

mcgyvr — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 13:55:38 GMT

@NigelHay wrote:

That seemed like a brilliant idea so I activated the ESKD support. It's easy to create notes but the appear in a weird typeface & I can't see any way of changing it. I also realised that, once activated, ESKD hijacks the standard leader notes & makes them Technical Requirements, they also display in a strange way so I ended up turning off ESKD. I've gone back to our previous method of having a drawing with all of our standard notes which get copied & pasted into other drawings.

Yes.. it certainly has its "cons"..

Its the only way to achieve what this post is about though..

Re: How to refer to BOM item number in a text box?

DarseyG — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 22:04:45 GMT

It's crude, but if your text is on the same page as the model, you can balloon the part and stretch the balloon all the way over to the text location (where you'd leave a space in the text line for the balloon) then edit the leader to effectively disappear. I've seen this with a premade balloon style. Though if you add/remove parts from the BOM to cause the numbering to change, it's also likely the image will move, also moving the balloon's position anyway.