Handling "rogue" part nos in drawings and sorting BOMs

[Tunalover]

Folks-
First problem: handling parts in a repeat region style BOM having one or more characters that Pro/E can't handle. For example, many US military standard parts have a slash ("/") in their part number. Suppose a spring washer has part number M1213/4C-6. How to handle this?

By design the BOM shows the filename as the part number. For example, an MS15795-802 flat washer has filename MS15795-802.prt. The BOM reports the part number by simply dropping the file extension using the system table parameter "asm_member_name". But what if the part number were M1213/4C-6. Pro/E can't accept M1213/4C-6.prt as a filename because of the illegal character "/". We traditionally replace the offending character with an underscore. In this case we make the model name M1213_4C-6.prt per our modeling practices. But when we list the model name as the part number it no longer gives the exact part number.

Going into every assembly model are parts having the user-defined model string parameter "mfgr_pn". In our start models this is a hyphen "-". For situations where the part number has one or more illegal characters, we replace the hyphen with the part number e.g. mfgr_pn would be "M1213/4C-6".

This is what I'm trying to do:

IF MFGR_PN is not equal to "-" THEN
asm_member_name=MFGR_PN
else
asm_member_name=rel_model_name
end if

"rel_model_name" is a system parameter but I'm not positive I have the syntax or spelling right.

Is what I'm trying to do possible? How exactly should the relation look to do this?

Second problem:
How can you sort a BOM alph-numerically (or numeric-alphabetically) by part number?

BTW there seems to be a huge void out there for 3rd party publications on advanced subjects like this. Even PTC offers little beyond expensive advanced courses and the notes that go with them!

TIA!


Tunalover

 

[robertib]

asm_member_name is a report parameter, and can't be altered.
What you will need to do is to create a parameter (eg model_name) in each part - a simple way to do this is to open the assembly, highlight all the parts in the assembly tree, Edit Parameters and add the parameter).
The you can use the relation

IF MFGR_PN is not equal to "-" THEN
model_name=MFGR_PN
else
model_name=asm_member_name
end if

The BOM automatically sorts alpha-numerically, but if you use Table -> Repeat Region -> Sort Regions you can set the sort to be whatever you want.