thanks for the reply. Now, Did anyone succeed in doing some customization to create the item No.? Because if you have 200 parts in an assy, the last thing you want is to go back and forth and match the items with the balloons.
Make sure that you have the balloons set to 3D associativity and Numbering in tools>options>drafting>annotation
The number shoud show up in the 2D. However it will not assign a number to sub-assys. If anyone knows how to assign a number to a sub please advise.
I got it to work! But the BOM isn't associative, so the first thing to do is delete the existing BOM.
In Assembly Design Workbench, go to ANALYZE + BILL OF MATERIAL to bring up a big panel. In the lower right corner, click on the DEFINE FORMATS box to customize your BOM. (note there are two colums: Displayed and Hidden)
I didn't want two lists, so I hide all the properties on the top portion.
On the bottom portion, put the NUMBER property into the Display column to add the balloon number to the BOM. Use the < and > icons to display/hide whatever properties you want. I used Number, Quantity, Part Number, and Nomencature for mine. You can also use the bottom icon to reorder the properties.
Now you can go back to your drawing and insert a new BOM that you've customized.
I think by using the bottom portion, I was able to include sub-assembly parts in the BOM.
That is pretty much impossible we have the same problem we do not want the parts of a subassembly numbered we want that subassembly as a whole numbered. Stated another way we want the first level children of an assembly numbered and nothing else. In the model we have given up on CATIA's default number altogether and have been using the Instance Description to hold the item number. We have a script that assign the numbers similar to CATIA's numbering plus it allows us to edit them if need be.
Shasbarg,
That sounds pretty good, thanks. Does your script run well with multiple instances of the same part? I would like to see the script if I could.
Adam
Unfortunately I am not able to release what has been written. I can though give a brief description of how it works. We load all of the existing numbers from the first level parts into a dictionary (key = part-number, value = item-number), check to see it has been previously numbered and ask to keep or replace numbers if necessary. Find the highest existing number if any are present in the list. Sort the parts alphanumerically and then number starting at +1 to the highest number found or 1. Apply the number to the instance description.
Now there are parts that I left out like we do not always number just one assembly at a time which complicates things enormously. We have what we call part families where different versions of an assembly get numbered according to our own standard (simplified as much as possible like parts get the same number, different parts get numbered incrementally higher across the part family).
The script runs fine with multiple instances because of the dictionary. The only problem is keeping the designers out of the instance description so they don't change the text. Another problem I ran into was deactivated parts hidden parts and reference parts which all also had to be programmed around.
