Format options for Product List Name in reports

[Anonymous]

When selecting a dimension based field on a report, you can specify to dispaly units or not as well as the type of units (decimal inches, fractional feet, etc.).

It would be nice if this fuctionality was extended to the Product list descriptions. Understandably it's more difficult to do with arbitrary text as opposed to a numberical field, but the text should be able to be parsed into some logical pieces.

When drawing and selecting a size, we typeically want to see "spaces" between sizes of a reducing fitting for instance. It makes the dropdown list more readable. 

On a drawing's BOM, we often want to eliminate all needless characters like spaces and inch marks to preserce drawing real estate.

In a CSV report, we may want decimals instead of fractions, and in a printed report, we may want to show the inch mark or ft inches.

It would be nice if reports had an option to parse and reformat the product list string or have the product lists have additional data to show multiple forms of formatting.

[Anonymous]

I think this is a good idea, but the arbitrary nature of the product list description is one of its strengths/features. The description as a property would absolutely need a flag to indicate exclusion from this sort of behavior as its default for reverse compatibility. Fine example would be coax tubing sizes where two of them are technically 3/4" in size and the inner is annotated purely by description. Another great example is a flow meter that has 5 different 1/2" versions with different GPM specifications.

Your suggestion has a lot of merit, but I always live in fear of Autodesk choosing to manage things that were ultimately more flexible and better left in my control.

FYI, our solution to this problem was to create all our BOM's in decimal inch and let lisp do the conversion (if we want) during our extraction process.

[Anonymous]

Understand what you're saying and I agree...there's risk there. But if implemented properly, should still allow for that type of flexibility. 

Simply looking at the numerical components of the string and appending inch marks likely isn't robust enough....especially in cases where you're mixing units...Blucher pipe, Hub & Spogot pipe...some may have both inch (diameter) and length (ft) in the product list string. 

Another issue is that the product list name needs to be unique. If you were looking at bolt sets, you can't have only the bolt size listed because pipe may be different diameters and/or bolt quantities. If you listed the bolt name the same 3 times and left the diameter/qty different in the product list, the bolt sets don't function properly when they get dropped in.  You have to add an arbitrary piece of text to them to make the names unique.   However when you do this, it prevents you from rolling up a total quantity of polts of a particular size because the product list name is different.

Perhaps what's needed, is an additional (optional) field where you could specify the "BOM" formatted text.....now that I think about it, there's already likely an unused field I could use for this purpose.

However this similar issue exists all over in the software...things need to be named one way for the software to work and another way for BOM purposes. Connectivity comes to mind....there's what you need to name it to make connectivity work, other entries purely for geometry purposes (round vs hex FPT) and those are often different than how you'd want to list connectivity on a BOM.

Perhaps the idea is allow for options for formatting entiries for BOM purposes across the product.