Bom Column description problems

I hope someone can help me. I have an assembly drawing consisting of 20
parts. Some dumb solids some sheetmetal parts and some fixings. When i
place the BOM in the drawing some of my custom fields are not updating.
Parts that have a material attached to them show up under the material
column but some don't. All parts have a material attached to the
models. For some strange reason some of the parts show there material
if they are attached to the config of a part and some only show up if
they are in the custom fields of the part, seems to be very
inconsistant from oart to part. Also, when i try and add a new column
to my BOM and pick a Custom Property the property from the model that i
am trying to add is not there, only standard solidworks properties seem
to be in there eg SW-Author. When i make a new drawing with just 1 part
in it i am able edit a column in the BOM and all of my custom
properties from my model are there. I am pulling my hair trying to get
this to work properly. Please can someone help me.

 

I have not seen such things (yet).

It would be helpful to know what release and SP you are on, where the
parts and assemblies come from, i.e., 2003,2004, 2005 etc. and whether
you are using the Excel based BOM or the SW BOM.

If you can capture this behavior using SW Rx send it in to your VAR.
You might get and SPR for it. If you can put a file somewhere for us to
look at grab the .wmv file from the Rx files.

I am in the habit of working entirely with configuration based custom
properties. I don't generally fill in the default ones. In setting up
configuration based properties there are certain check and list boxes
that you might want to examine on each file. Their settings can effect
what is displayed in the BOM.

There are also settings in Options.

 

Dames, I feel your pain, but can't contribute much except to second
TOP's advice. Any program, unless you've found a major bug problem,
will operate consistantly. Our task is often to try to figure out what
the consistant thread is.

IMHO, Solidworks has some major issues to deal with with regards to the
flexibility, usability & consistency of the BOM. Either that, or then
need to publish a learned tome of how best to utilize what they have
coded into it.

As TOP said, though, a consistent set of custom properties helps. I've
just sweated through making up parts and assemblies and BOM templates
for our company with a set of custom properties - talk about brain
sprain - that seems to work the way we want it to, with some
adaptations on our part. But there are shortcomings, particularly
relating to getting, say, developed length of a part into the BOM (our
BOM include part dimensions for ordering material).

All in all, I think they really need to focus some efforts here. As I
said on another thread, keeping the BOM info linked to the model is
paramount. Us analyst types can be off by a 1000 psi or so, but that
drawing and BOM has to be lock-on.

 

For starters. I was using 2005 sp2.0 when i first posted this msg. but
have since upgraded to 3.0 but these problems still seem to be there. I
have part templates setup with custom properties for most of my parts,
it just seems to be happening with some of my BOM not all. I have sent
of my full assembly and drawing file to my Var to see if they can
figure it out but i have not heard back from them yet. By the way Tom
you mention that you have problems getting a developed lenght of a
part. For many months i needed the same thing on my sheetmetal parts
but no one could help me. Then the penny droped. All i neede to do was
put an Unfold feature into my part, add 2 construction line that end
points of these lines are coincident to the edges of the flat pattern,
place a dimension on these line(wich are notes) then fold it back up.
Then in the custom properties i have a field called Blank_X and
Blank_y wihch is populated by the 2 dims from the constuction line
sketch. It works for me but there might be a better way. I have heard
that there will be somthing to get these lenghts in 2006.
Cheers
Damian

 

I ran into something similar while working with custom properties.

Do the affected parts' custom properties all have the same capitalization?

I was working with the API and found out that "material", "Material" and
"MATERIAL" are three different things.

RMcHugh

 

Good question. I did find that 1 of my parts was in lower case and i
tried to make it upper case but this would not change in my BOM it
stayed in lower case

 

Good question. I did find that 1 of my parts was in lower case and i
tried to make it upper case but this would not change in my BOM it
stayed in lower case

 

Not to beat a dead horse, but...
I found that I had to delete the lower case property entirely then
replace it with a properly cased one.