New BOM tool

[contact66RVF]

I have been trying the new BOM tool that came in todays release 2.0.18719

It doesn't seem to make any difference which components are selected, the resulting BOM always contains every component to the bottom of the hierarchy.

[Phil.E]

Hi,

Thanks for posting your question, and for trying out BOM.

In the image, it's not clear what you are trying to do or expect. I see a BOM for the assembly on screen, with one line item picked. What is the expectation you have at this point?

[contact66RVF]

My expectation was that the BOM would contain the selected components only.
The actual behaviour was the BOM contained everything and what was selected
made no difference to the contents of the BOM.

Adam

[Phil.E]

Thanks for the reply.

The BOM is intended to be a complete list of all items in a design. 

Have you read the help documentation about BOM?

[contact66RVF]

I have been reading the product documentation for the new BOM tool.

Page Assemblies/Bill of Materials/Select Bill of Materials items

It talks at a bit about the functionality of selecting an item in the BOM dialogue and it highlighting the corresponding item in the component browser and vice versa. It indeed does not say anything further than this.

If I see a dialogue with the ability to select some of them, my assumption is that this action of selecting items is going to be reflected in the output. It is after all a selection tick box and that is the expected behavior. 

As far as I can see the selection boxes in the BILL OF MATERIALS dialogue performs no function other than when you click on it it highlights the corresponding component in the browser.

I found the user interface metaphor of a selection box here confusing.

I currently use BOM Creator from the app store and it mostly has done what I have wanted. The main problem however is that my design will be using a model I have obtained from a vendor. A recent example is I have a model for a rack mount lithium battery pack. This model is made from literally a hundred components down to the last screw and washer it is composed from and I don't want them in my BOM, just one line item for the battery.

When I saw check boxes on the BOM dialog I thought great, I will be able to select the top level component but not all the irrelevant bits it is composed of. That would be top of my wish list for a BOM tool. A way to specify this component should be in the BOM but not its sub-components.

[Phil.E · Accepted solution]

Currently there is no ability to filter items as excluded/included.

The current use of selected items in the BOM is for managing them. If you look on the 3 dot menu, in the upper right, a list of actions are possible, based on the selected items in the list. These are actions within the Manage Extension. 

Thanks for the feedback on BOM. Glad to see you are exploring it. 

[jeremy_lambert]

Hi there,

I wanted to echo what Phil said, thank you for trying our Bill of Material feature. The intent of the checkboxes are to allow for actions to be taken, both from within the canvas as well as from within the dialog. As Phil mentioned, our first implementation is with Manage Extension commands. That said, we fully intend to add more. Thank you for mentioning include/exclude and subassembly behavior as some of the actions you're looking for. We're tracking these as enhancement requests. I've also requested our team improve the documentation.

Thanks again for the feedback!

-jeremy

Jeremy Lambert
Principal Product Manager
Autodesk, Inc.