Bill of Materials (Quantities)

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:

  • Item
  • Description
  • Manufacturer
  • Part#
  • Certification

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?