topic Re: Automatic BOM export in Inventor Programming Forum

Automatic BOM export

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:23:29 GMT

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.

Re: Automatic BOM export

mrattray — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:58:01 GMT

A .net solution using Inventor Apprentice may work.

Re: Automatic BOM export

jdkriek — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:17:21 GMT

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.

Re: Automatic BOM export

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:52:59 GMT

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...)

Re: Automatic BOM export

mcgyvr — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:30:33 GMT

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.

Re: Automatic BOM export

Curtis_W — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:50:19 GMT

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

Re: Automatic BOM export

blair — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 22:39:29 GMT

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

Re: Automatic BOM export

bobvdd — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:18:41 GMT

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

Re: Automatic BOM export

a_angel — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:42:05 GMT

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

Re: Automatic BOM export

bobvdd — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 20:24:12 GMT

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

Re: Automatic BOM export

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:23:59 GMT

Thank you all for your replies.

We are currently looking into your suggestions to see which one is best suited for our needs.

Thank you,

Jason

Re: Automatic BOM export

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:56:58 GMT

hi,

I used BOM xtractor, How to add the colum which I required. example: title, Materail and some custome iproperty.

thanks in advance,

Nanda

Inventor 2011

Re: Automatic BOM export

tech — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 08:35:49 GMT

Hi maybe try BOM Tools. You can customise which iProperties (inclucing custome), Parameters and sheet metal extenets you would like to export. This is nice for creating cutlists etc. It also exports Thumbnails into Excel.

www.mgfx.co.za/tools-for-inventor.htm

Cheers

Re: Automatic BOM export

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 13:41:16 GMT

Hey guys I know this is old news but I have been all over the web looking for solutions for bom export. The examples here work great, but when i use ilogic to export the BOM it rearranges my columns in a different order in which they appear in inventor. If i do a traditional bom export save as etc. it will do the columns in correct order, why is this? I am talking about the rule as simple as this... ThisBOM.Export("Parts Only", "fileName", kMicrosoftExcelFormat) rearranging the column format....

Re: Automatic BOM export

bobvdd — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 23:15:35 GMT

I don't know why the iLogic code that you mention is providing only a fixed order of columns. VBA would give you more flexibility.
If you still want to use iLogic, it is relatively easy to change the column orderr AFTER the file is created.

In attached code , I create a CSV file called C:\Users\User\Documents\Inventor\bom.csv

You can influence the column order by changing the order of the numbers on this line in the code:

displayorder = {9, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1}

In my example of 9 columns, I swapped columns 1 and 9 around and also columns 2 and 3.

Cheers

Bob

'Default  BOM order
'1 = BOM Structure
'2 = Description
'3 = Item
'4 = Part Number
'5 = REV
'6 = Stock Number
'7 = Thumbnail
'8 = QTY
'9 = Unit QTY
Dim displayorder As Array
'displayorder = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9} ' default
displayorder = {9, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1}

Dim filename = "C:\Users\User\Documents\Inventor\bom.csv"
ThisBOM.Export("Parts Only", filename, kTextFileCommaDelimitedFormat)

Dim tempfile As String
Dim i As Integer
tempfile = filename + "_tmp"

Dim ReadCSV As New System.IO.StreamReader(filename)
Dim TestArray As New ArrayList()

Dim oFile As System.IO.File
Dim oWrite As System.IO.StreamWriter
oWrite = oFile.CreateText(tempfile) 

  Dim textline As String
  Dim j As Integer
  j=0
  Do While ReadCSV.Peek <> -1 ' Loop until end of file.
   Testarray.Add(ReadCSV.ReadLine.Split(","))
   Dim newstr As String
   newstr = ""
   For i = 0 To UBound(displayorder)

       If newstr <> "" Then
        newstr = newstr + "," + TestArray (j) (displayorder(i)-1)
       Else
        newstr = TestArray (j) (displayorder(i)-1)
       End If
   Next i
   j= j+1
   oWrite.WriteLine(newstr)
Loop

ReadCSV.Close()
oWrite.Close()

System.IO.File.Delete( filename )
System.io.File.Move(tempfile, filename)

Re: Automatic BOM export

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 12:32:11 GMT

Thanks that does work, I have 14 columns so i just had to add the additional numbers.

Re: Automatic BOM export

bobvdd — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 16:51:27 GMT

Glad I could be of help.

Bob

Re: Automatic BOM export

_RKF_ — Tue, 21 May 2024 11:55:55 GMT

Hi,

I was using your CustomTask.exe and I find it very useful. Many thanks for that exe file. Last time I turned for Inventor 2024 and ... CustomTask.exe stopped working. When I start defined custom task It says it didn't find arguments (csv + rule) I'm sure I do everything correct. Using same thing on Inventor 2021 everything goes smoothly. Can you help please?

Radek

Re: Automatic BOM export

_RKF_ — Wed, 22 May 2024 07:46:06 GMT

.. figured it out. If useful for anybody - For Inv 2021 and all previous releases it was the CustomTask.exe syntax for parameters to give them both as full paths in quotes separated by space eg.: "c:\temp\myList.csv" "c:\temp\myRule.txt". It didn't work for 2024 task scheduler (ver 5.0). It works, at least in my case, the syntax:

c:\temp\myList.csv" "c:\temp\myRule.txt

HTH

Radek.