I've been working on this problem for a few days and I haven't come up with a satisfactory solution. Here is what I would like to see:

1. Drawing templates that autopopulate based on properties that the user fills out, specifically "number" and "description".

2. BOMs that autopopulate based on the same "number" and "description". The kicker is that toolbox parts should also populate those BOMs with their appropriate "number" and "description".

3. Finally, the "number" and "description" (on non-toolbox parts) should map to "number" and "description" in workgroup PDM.

Now here is my struggle...

Toolbox parts have their descriptions built in the configuration name. I would love to use that and not repeat work by having to put in our own descriptions in a seperate field. I can easily bring those into BOMs, but they won't been in the same column as "description" in our normal parts. I could name the configuration to match our descriptions in our normal parts and just use the configuration name as the description. However, I don't believe you can map "configuration name" to "description" in PDM. I know you can map custom properties to the PDM properties, but I'm not sure about SW properties such as "configuration name". I just thought of this tonight, so I'll have to check tomorrow.

Can anyone share their "good" solution to these property mismatches?

And finally, my rant...

Why is this so difficult? All these products are part of solidworks. Why the hell don't they integrate them properly? Toolbox has this "part number" field that is some magic field that isn't like all the other properties. So you can't use "part number" for your custom parts to have everything come up when you select "part number" in a column of a BOM. No, instead you have to put in a seperate custom property in toolbox and the base "part number" column goes unused? Maybe I don't understand and someone will correct me on all this, but if this is the case, I can't believe how poor this is.