Saved BOM Sort Configurations

[imckenzieY7CGY]

The functionality currently exists in the webapp to "Configure Sort" of a BOM view - in the below view I've configured a sort by Item Type as a first level, Item Name as a second level. 

When I navigate away from this view, this sort specification will be lost. As a result, managers often have designers manually go through assembly BOMs and drag items into a sorted sequence order one-by-one until this desired sort order (by item type) is defaulted to when they open a BOM view, wasting time that should be spent adding value to the designs. 

The following should be available instead:

1. Users should be able to set a default sort order for their profile, and new BOM views should automatically show in this sort order. 
2. Users should be able to save their personalized sort configurations and be able to quickly change between them.
3. In conjunction with a previous post I've made, it should be possible to quickly navigate down through the tree to effectively Ctrl+F the Item Name/Number/etc you're looking for. Having to manually scroll through a gigantic list is not a good solution, even though the ability to persist the sort order will definitely improve that. 
4. In my view, this is somewhat of a stretch goal/extra: Once the desired sort order is achieved for a BOM, it could be possible to push that order through to the sequence number such that sorting by sequence number reproduces the same sort. 

[andreja.schneider]

Hi @imckenzieY7CGY ,

our default sort experience comes from sequence order provided in the CAD design. We understand it could be the case when this type of order may be insufficient and we allow to sort and group on wide range of item attributes. Apart for example above (item type and item name) could you give us any other useful types of sorting mechanisms that your company might benefit from? 

Best regards,

Andreja Schneider

[imckenzieY7CGY]

@andreja.schneider For us, the main go-to is to sort by item type, but for example, it could be advantageous to sort BOMs by manufacturer so I can see all the components an assembly uses from McMaster-Carr for example, or all the Hardware used in an assembly. We could want to quickly see all the released components to judge if we can order them early to mitigate lead times. And in CNs especially, it would be great to be able to quickly see all the components about to be affected by the CN while in Edit mode ( 'Filter by selected' only currently works in non-edit mode, which has been a source of frustration for years).

Some of these sorts are already possible to do once, but there's no way of persisting them so that they aren't lost as soon as you close the page. Drag and dropping all the items in a BOM is currently the only way to persist the order you want.  

As for the current default, the sequence order in the CAD design is often arbitrary and isn't really a useful sort - when we design assemblies, we're not designing all of one type of part first and then another type of part; it's an iterative and at times chaotic process and then on top of that revisions past the initial design add new parts to the end of the sequence. The sequence that items appear in the CAD has no relation to how people wanting to manage the BOM downstream will want to work with the BOM. The order of components in CAD can also sometimes be driven by the need to create geometric relationships between the parts, which has no meaning in BOM management - in order to pattern a bolt over all the holes in another part, the part with holes must exist first. Now, we do often try to organize our BOMs in CAD (Solidworks in our case) with folders, but for me this is just clicking a macro button at the end of the design to group all the Purchased parts in one folder and the Hardware components in another - the sequence is not changed. 

[imckenzieY7CGY]

Just to update this thread, I have achieved persistent BOM sorting through the API by modifying the sequence number based on the attributes I want to sort on. However in my view, this shouldn't be something that requires a custom API application because users are going to have the need to sort the BOM in various ways depending on the task they're carrying out and while they can use the built-in sort function to set it up once, it should be able to persist after they navigate away from the view. 

My solution takes something like this:

And the new persistent order becomes: 

Not demonstrated here is that my solution is a multi-level sort, first on item type & refOnly, then mfr name, then item name.