For years many of us are wondering why SW can't allow some of the quantities of a balloon to be distributed to other of the same item on different drawing views. If I have 50 1/4-20 screws we should be able to take some of them and place them on other 1/4-20 screws elsewhere in the drawing. Pro\ENGINEER has been doing that since the 90's. Why can't SOLIDWORKS?
Have you looked to see if there is an ER covering this? If so, have you voted for it? If not, have you created an ER?
How does one do any of the above things?
This would be a dream for me (to do the OP's suggestion) - I currently have to manually edit the quantities when I do this and I hate doing anything that isn't parametric, because invariably in 3 years someone else is going to open my design, make a change and then they won't know they also have to tweak the balloons.
SPR 54356 looks like it. Maybe 550571 too.
Both of those SPRs look like what I want on splitting balloons.
William Abely wrote:
For years many of us are wondering why SW can't allow some of the quantities of a balloon to be distributed to other of the same item on different drawing views. If I have 50 1/4-20 screws we should be able to take some of them and place them on other 1/4-20 screws elsewhere in the drawing. Pro\ENGINEER has been doing that since the 90's. Why can't SOLIDWORKS?
How does Pro\E handle the distributions? Is it parametric? I can 100% see the benefit, but just trying to figure out how the software can "know" that this balloon should cover, say, 4 out of the dozen you have in the model. Do you just tell it "4" on that balloon and it tells you "You have 8 left" kinda like the guy behind the donut counter filling your box? I can easily see how it could look at all balloons on the drawing, add up your typed-in quantity, and tell you that you haven't accounted for all (or have accounted for too many). That could even be done with a macro.
In Pro/E, you would split the quantity (I don't remember the exact command) and tell it how many to attach to a new location. If you had 5 in one balloon and 3 in another and needed them both to be 4, there was a command to redistribute from one balloon to the other. It is parametric. At one time, you could not make a balloon for an item if it had one already. I think they added reference balloons to get around that, but it's been a few years since I used Pro/E regularly.
It took a bit to get everything distributed right, but you didn't have to worry about making sure all your screw counts added up like I do in SolidWorks.
Carrie
Carrie Ives wrote:
In Pro/E, you would split the quantity (I don't remember the exact command) and tell it how many to attach to a new location. If you had 5 in one balloon and 3 in another and needed them both to be 4, there was a command to redistribute from one balloon to the other. It is parametric.
What you have outlined here doesn't sound parametric. It sounds manual with a little bit of intelligent assistance. I could write that code. What happens if you change your model and drop a couple from one grouping, or add a few more? How does Pro\E know which balloon to change? Or does it just tell you "your counts don't match anymore"? (again, I could write that) Does it let you know at rebuild, or put some icon on that line of the BOM?
Reading that, its sounds kind of argumentative.... That's not my intent. I am just trying to make sure I understand right. If it really was parametric (changes to the model automatically update values correctly) that would be pretty awesome, but I am stumped trying to come up with some way that it could even be done. At some point the user would have to "assign" items to a group (folder or something?) within the model structure, right?
The grouping is manual but the total count is parametric. When you add or delete items, one of the balloons will change quantity. (I don't remember if you get notice or if you just have to hunt for what changed.) They may have improved it. I haven't really dealt with that regularly for several years.
On the "your counts don't match anymore" comment. So, you could write a macro to check that the manually typed in quantities add up to the total quantity on the BOM?
Carrie
Sure... With one caveat. It depends on where you want that value to be.
API cannot read or write this value:
This is confirmed by SolidWorks API support, with SPR 559173. Currently set to severity "high", but we'll see about when it actually gets implemented. As I have recently found, the API is pretty weak sauce when it comes to balloons.
If you're talking about a separate balloon, yes, I could do that.
Of course I want to read and write (or at least read) the manually entered text for the balloon quantity. With the size of the assemblies I am working on right now, checking the quantities by counting doesn't take much.
Carrie Ives wrote:
Of course I want to read and write (or at least read) the manually entered text for the balloon quantity. With the size of the assemblies I am working on right now, checking the quantities by counting doesn't take much.
Of course! That would make a whole lot of sense. And once they fix that SPR, it'll be possible to do.
In the meantime, I had to write a bunch more code. Long story short, I made a macro for a customer that creates a separate, grouped balloon with no border right next to the actual balloon, so that it looks just like what's shown above but I could actually read and write the number.
BUMP
S. Casale wrote:
BUMP
Umm, what kind of bump are you looking for?
KEEP THIS THREAD ON TOP.
Vote for SPR 54356 / 550571, that's going to be the way to get SW to look in to it.
Admittedly, given how old the first one of those is, I wouldn't hold your breath...
already done a bit ago
What do you hope to accomplish by keeping the thread on top? Just looking to annoy folks? Have you voted for the ERs?
Josh Brady wrote:
What do you hope to accomplish by keeping the thread on top? Just looking to annoy folks? Have you voted for the ERs?
That's exactly what I want to do. You got me.
Why don't you start being a moderator?
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