Total of individual Part Numbers in a large assembly

[rrrocket]

I usually work in large assemblies, typically 5k to 10k parts count. What I have been unable to determine is the number of individual part numbers contained in those assemblies. Some of those part numbers, say for standard parts, will be used in several branches at different places in the product structure, and other parts will be used in arrays, so that there will be occurrences of the same part number in one assembly.
Short of exporting the content of the Assembly Navigator to a spreadsheet, and doing some filtering (I’m not good at this), and risking mistakes due to duplications, is there an easy way to do this?
Just to add a little complication, I also use suppressed components in assemblies, so I would like two different totals, with and without suppression.
Any thoughts?

NX4/TC9.1

 

[JohnRBaker]

I have an old GRIP program that counts the number of components and reports how many have unique names, but not the actual names themselves, as well as some other interesting statistics. I guess it could be modified to run a tally of the names found and report that. As for being able to detect which are and which are not suppressed, I don't know (the program was written before Component Suppression was an issue).

Note that I just tested the program on an assembly with nearly 12,000 components and it took about 10 seconds to report that there were only 977 unique components in the assembly.

BTW, this program was written in 1994 and last updated in 1997 although it appears that the copy that I have was compiled in 1999, AND IT STILL RUNS TODAY!!!!!

Anyway, if you're familiar with GRIP I could download a copy of the source code and it might give you a place to start (I'd volunteer to look into it myself except that I leave for vacation tomorrow morning and won't be back until September 8th).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[rrrocket]

Thanks for that – looks just the ticket. I haven’t used GRIP for years, but I know people who have, so I’ll give it a go and get it modified for the suppressed parts.

977 parts from 12000 is a fair reduction. That means there are merely 977 parts to design/draw/procure/validate/configure/assemble and test. It makes the task seem almost do-able….

Enjoy your vacation.

 

[hudson888]

I think that you may be unable to address suppressed part using grip. The theory behind that statement goes that GRIP had ceased being developed to support new enhancements to UG/NX some time ago at a point before the suppression (or almost anything to do with assemblies), was introduced.

Sorry to say that I guess I can help prevent you from wasting time but don't have any ideal solution readily to hand.

Surely NX Open programming using C or VB would support this kind of thing.

Had I wanted to do what the grip program does out of hand then I might have tried using the command line utility that comes with NX called ugpc.exe. Run from your DOS command line that will list the contents of an assembly. I think it works with your load options default file to find the components.

An extension of that is a program available on the internet called ugzipc. The website is below and he distributes the source with it as freeware. The program works as ugpc might but places the contents in a zip file of your hard disk. That is pretty cool in itself, but having the source may be useful to somebody as yourself who wants to do a similar task with a different output.

Cheers

Hudson

http://www.w-eng.de/ugzipc.htm

 

[JohnRBaker]

OK here is the current GRIP program, as is.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[DavidTolsma]

If the assembly has suppressed components, does it really exist? Sorry the whole "if a tree falls in the woods can you hear it" statement is echoing...

If you need to do this often, I would look at investing some time to create a UG/Open program to break down the assembly and sort any way you would like.


-Dave Tolsma

http://Tolsnet.com/jobs

http://groups.google.com/group/NX_CAX/

http://groups.google.com/group/plm-exchange/

 

[rrrocket]

Yes, the part very much exists: consider the example of a casting and a machined part made from that casting. The casting is a child of the machined part, linked together by WAVE or promotion (see separate thread running at present). The casting has to be designed and procured, but does not appear in the parts count; the machined part does that. So the casting is suppressed as it is not a part included in the assembly, but I need to know that that part number exists, hence my interest in differentiating between the two totals.

 

[hudson888]

Following up on a recently updated thread, in those cases you could might find that using promotions suits your needs better.

Cheers

Hudson