Hi all,
I'm getting back into MicroStation after 15 years and I'm looking for a little guidance on how to best set up the automatic generation of bills of materials.
What I did with AutoCAD was, I set up a block (cell) and I created attributes (tags) within the block, so for example: I created a block with a 1:1 physical representation of an L8 circuit breaker and inside the block there were 5 attributes:
I would then create a visibility toggle which could change the attributes depending on if the user selected this block to be a 1, 2 or 3A breaker (whatever was available in the L8 series). This made block creation a little more complicated but lessened how many blocks were required and if the series would change I wouldn't need to revise 20 blocks, I could just update what I needed and it would change all instances,
So getting back to the design, I would have an electrical panel with all the parts I needed inserted as block and once finished I would insert that panel into a title block and I would use AutoCAD's data extraction to extract the attributed data into a CSV/table giving me a complete list of all the parts used in the electrical panel (I did eventually automate this process but I don't want to get too complicated for this comparison).
So with MicroStation I'm reading about Tags and I'm also reading about "Items", I'm not sure if I can get either system to work the same way as described above (I.E. insert a cell and all information is held within the block, and potentially changeable by drop down list or similar toggle).
Can anybody think of ways I might be able to achieve this?
Hi Michael
The best way to do this is to use ITEM TYPES. this is a huge topic so it would be best to read up on it first
Item Types (bentley.com)
Ian
This will help get started: 03 What are Item Types? - YouTube
Regards,
Mark
OpenRoads Designer 2022 R3 (10.12) | Microstation 2023.1 | ProjectWise CE 3.4
Okay so this is pretty crude but I have created a cell with an item type and have successfully reported it out as desired.
So my next step is to make it a variable cell, I have gone into the cell and created the variables but unfortunately I don't quite know how to get these variations to show up when I place it in a drawings as a cell.
Everything I'm reading is pointing me to create parametric shapes but for my needs the physical representation is identical just part number and ratings are changing, therefore I wouldn't want the model being changed in this way. Does anyone know of a way of just creating a parametric item type only? Am I missing something?
I have achieved what I wanted and how I was able to get this to work was:
1. Created the geometry and created the Item types I desired.
2. I created the variations that I required to cover the entire product range. (Each variation essentially changes the Description and Part#)
3. When creating the cell ensure that parametric is selected (missed this one a few times).
4. Insert the cell as normal, under properties it's now possible to select the variant:
5. When reporting it's important to note that we need to apply the following settings or it will either not see the item types or it will see every item type and give an undesired value.
Now that's figured out I will be looking at ways I can expand upon the functionality. I would like to get a piece of text to update with the variations for example I'm thinking of placing the Amp rating in the breaker so when the 10A variant is selected it will read 10A, if the user chooses 16A then the text will read 16A etc...I've been messing around with fields and item types but so far I've not been able to get this functionality. Has anyone found a way of doing this?
Does this help? Update 17: Item Type Text - YouTube