Why is PART NUMBER not uniform between Parts, Drawing files and ToolBox

Just out of curiosity, did you have formal SW training or were you sat down in front of a computer and told to learn it yourself?

Out of the box, part number is pulled from Bill of Materials Options field in the configuration property manager.  There are three selections for how SW will populate the field:  Document (file) name, Configuration name or User Specified Name.  I do not use Toolbox so I do not know how the properties are set.

From your screen shots, I see you have modified the BOM table to use your part number custom property.  I will assume Toolbox does not create either a part number or description custom property (although I see you fill in your data on the custom tab; maybe your toolbox parts fills the information in the configuration specific tab).

Fortunately or Unfortunately SolidWorks is customize-able and in many cases can be made to work with your company's workflow.  You need to pick which works best for you and make sure all parts are created following that procedure.  Since I do not use Toolbox, I do not know if it can be customized to create PART NUMBER and Description field.

Where I work we use configurations, so our custom properties are put in the configuration specific tab.  We also have a macro (now an add-in in PDM) that we used long before SW had the Custom Properties tab and other functionality.  This "macro" automatically changed the BOM Options to User Specified and populated it with the data found in our part number custom property (we use the part number custom property to populate our drawing format).  This works for us but it probably will not work for you since you have probably have many parts done using the custom tab.

As Solid Air said, PART NUMBER is automatically generated by the software for every Part.  If you want to use your own custom property I'd suggest naming it something else (I have "Part Name" that I've used for years, since back then you couldn't call out the PART NUMBER property in a Note, which always baffled me).

Because sometimes they don`t see the whole picture.

They explain that you can use your own PartNumber, it is true but in this case you can`t:

1. use ToolboxPart number

2. [SW-BOM PartNumber] in PropertyTabBuilder because there is no ability to assign custom property to it

We asked them a lot of times

How to link SW-Part number property to custom property

sw-part number not bi-directional.....

, but they don`t answer because they don`t work in their program each day and don`t see the whole picture in details.

I`m programmer a little bit and I understand them - it is very hard and painstaking work.

You have to describe each function and procedure very thoroughly and keep a lot of things in your brain.

My advice, don`t use SW Toolbox,if you add your own custom properties to it, each time Toolbox generator create new instance it will override your settings. Make your own library instead and use sldsetdocprp.exe utility. Moreover when you work with big assemblies you need to simplify your parts (supress fillets and chamfers and maybe override mass by mean of $SW-Mass in design table).

You`ll ask about smart fastener, I don`t use smart fastener feature because:

• sometimes frame members are not parallel
• sometimes you don`t want to model exact coincidence of parts
• I have my own rules for parts custom properties and fasteners designations and can`t use Toolbox because of reason mentioned above

Sorry, I take my words back!

The solution is very simple - is to use custom (for example PartNo) property in configuration property menu.

Many thanks to Bill Toft for its post here Is it possible to group BOM items by certain properties?

The Toolbox part number uses the "User Specified Name" option in the configuration properties.  I had to write a macro that copies this value to our configuration specific PARTNUMBER so it would report correctly.  I have attached the macro for your use if you choose.  You will need to edit the macro and set the configuration specific property name.

It depends how much you want to code your components will be the result in the link of them.

On mi case partNo = *.slprt "Alphanumeric codes"

When I save a part, the result it transfer to the BOM table easy. Take a look a little. "I have a custon Toolbox"

Try to be very organized with the templates and the LDM and everything will come out fast and easy.

Codes - YouTube

Here how you could modify your toolbox with customized data as you wish

New custom toolbox English to Spanish - YouTube

I hope it will be usefull to you