Hello,

I just started working a new job, and was hired in to help with the Solidworks administration, though I've not used Solidworks in a few years (not many people around here have any Solidworks experience, and it's new software for the company). Anyway, these guys here are used to seeing drawings done a certain way (Autocad...) in the office, and out in the shop...... I can't seem to get them to budge on some things, and one of those things that they won't budge on is how they'd like to see the BOM..... Let me give you an example of how they like to see their BOM and then maybe someone can give me some direction in how I would go about customizing a BOM to do this, so that it doesn't have to be manually inputted. Thanks!

Okay, for the Top Level Assembly, they'd like to see the BOM structured with all sub assemblies, and then the parts at that level, with regular part numbering, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on...... That's not the issue.... The issue is how they want to see things in the Sub assembly/weldment prints.

For instance, if the "MANIFOLD" sub assembly is item number 2 on the top level assembly, then they would like the part numbering scheme on the MANIFOLD assembly like this: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4................ What they've been doing so far is manually breaking the item number links and entering in 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc, and then on Sub assembly 3 which we can just call "INLET" they would manually enter 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 etc.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could automate this? I tried doing a column with an equation that linked to a custom property and added a dot and then added the item number, and then named the column Item No.... But I quickly realized this does not work, because the ballons still reflect the item number that I was using in the equation. So my BOM was showing 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and so on, while the ballooned parts were just showing 1, 2, 3, 4............. Argh! I'm out of ideas at this point and back to thinking I may have to manually enter this in....

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!