I have been using SolidWorks for 10+ years but am new to creating custom templates for Bill of Materials.

I am trying to update my company's templates to make things a little more automated and have run into an issue with populating the Drawing Number in the title block of a drawing and the Part Number in the Bill of Materials.

Currently the "PartNo" custom property in part and assembly files are used to fill in both fields.  The issue is that the Part Number displayed in the BOM needs to be a six digit number appended with a configuration number in the form <drawing number> - <configuration number> (i.e. 123456-01), where the Drawing Number on the face of the drawing must be the six digit number only without the configuration number (i.e. 123456).

The current way we work around this is by creating a default configuration with PartNo set to the Drawing number (used to populate the Drawing Number) and a -01 configuration with the PartNo set to the full Part Number with Configuration Number (used to populate the BOM).  It seems to me that there might be a better way to do this; I thought I might present the question to see if anyone has had a similar problem.

In my case, my company just began using Enterprise PDM which automatically assignes an auto-incremented six digit Drawing Number and assigns it to the PartNo property (without the configuration number).

I would like to leave the PartNo property the way it is (having EPDM assign the next number) and have a ConfigurationNo property that would just contain the dash number for the specific part configuration.  But in order to do this, I would have to be able to concatenate the PartNo and ConfiguratioNo properties in the BOM.  From what I have read, I don't see a way to do this.

Another option would be adding a DrawingNo property to the Custom Properties and have EPDM assign the next autoincremented number to the DrawingNo property; however I would ideally like the PartNo property to update based on the assigned number and prepopulate the -01 configuration.

I know this might be asking too much, but I wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone had any clever ideas.

Thanks.