Catalog Check & Panel Bill of Materials creating false assemblies

[klonbeck]

While reviewing drawings from another designer I found that the Catalog Check and Bill of Materials can create a false assembly, thus displaying or extracting incorrect parts.

In the Edit Component dialog, the designer typed a catalog value of "LU2B12BL" and an assembly value of "LU2B12BL".

if the Catalog Lookup button is click the search result returns “No catalog records matching the search string were found.”, which is accurate. The problem appears when you use Catalog Check. The Catalog Check dialog in this scenario will report catalog data, the Bill of Materials report will also extract this same data.

In the catalog database there is a record with "LU2B12BL" as the catalog value, but this record does not have assembly code or assembly list values. There are two records in the database that have an assembly list value of "LU2B12BL" but the catalog value for these records do not equal "LU2B12BL".

Given that there is no record that truly matches the catalog and assembly values supplied by the designer, Catalog Lookup supports this statement. How and why would the Catalog Check and the Bill of Materials report, display a result different from the Catalog Lookup?

This is partially user error and the simple solution is don't manually type in the catalog and assembly values. With that said, better error checking should be employed by the Catalog Check and Bill of Materials queries so that the Catalog Lookup, Catalog Check & Bill of Materials reports display the same results.

We are running AutoCAD Electrical 2018 on Windows 10 64bit

[rhesusminus]

I've notified some contacts in Autodesk about this.

[ChrisPreece]

Hi @klonbeck,

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. I agree about the workaround would be to avoid manually entering catalog values, as this creates a false value elsewhere. But you're right, there probably should be a way for AutoCAD Electrical to check for inconsistencies across the Catalog Check, Catalog Lookup, and BOM reports. 

If you haven't already, I would definitely recommend submitting this feedback via the Product Feedback channel. It's likely that the development team is already aware of the issue since @rhesusminus reached out, but it wouldn't hurt to submit your own comments as well. 

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