BOM row parent type

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am looking to ease the import of the Inventor BoM into our ERP system. In order for it to work I need to identify the parent assembly for each component. While there is no "parent" property in the column chooser in the BoM, I was wondering if there is a quick way of achieving this.

Thank you,

Arek 

[philippe.leefsma]

Hi Arek,

Is that an API question? You can use "BOMRow.ComponentDefinitions" property, then from the ComponentDefinition you can easily determine the parent document: ComponentDefinition.Document Property ...

Hope that helps,

Philippe.

[salariua]

Just curious on how are you going to handle reused parts in multiple subassemblies?

[Anonymous]

I was hoping it would not involve the API as I have no previous experience working with it. Is this something you could walk me through quickly or is it a lot more involved than that? Our fall back is to use a script in excel to read the structured item numbers and determine the parents from that.

[Anonymous]

Never even though that far out as I have not been involved with the scoping of the ERP system. The parent is only required to import the BoM in to the ERP, from there I would hope the sytem generates a purchase order and groups reused parts.

[salariua]

The reason I am asking is because we had a little add-on that would put this info (parent assembly Part Number and Description) in the drawing title block of the part but on reused parts it would get the last processed parent (last one found). So there might never be a single parent.

[philippe.leefsma]

What do you mean exactly with "Our fall back is to use a script in excel..." ? Do you want to connect to Inventor using VBA from Excel and then invoke the API to gather the info you need?

That would be a rather straightforward thing to do if you have experience with the API. I cannot walk you "quickly" through it if you have no programming experience or never used the Inventor API but the best place to get started is the Inventor Developer Center

Hope that helps,

Philippe.

[Anonymous]

We were thinking much simpler, first exporting the BoM from Inventor to Excel and then using the indented item numbers (1.2.3) to determine the parent (using some sort of script hopefully). I was just hoping there would be an easy way to add this (parent part number column) to the actual BoM view in Inventor so we would not have to process it in excel after the export.

[philippe.leefsma]

I don't think it is possible. If it's not doable in the UI directly, then the API won't be able to do it as well...

Regards,

Philippe.

[Anonymous]

Hi salariua,

i'm trying to do what you're describing here, except i want to create a list of the parent part #'s (to avoid the problem where it is used in multiple places). is it possible to post this add-on you're referring to?