I have seen this requirement beyond a pure electronics vertical space. Any manufacturer that has a pcb in the Bill of Material can have this as an issue. Even if they are not making the boards, they need to provide the Ref-Des information for their vendor. I like the idea of Characteristics at the BOM line item.
11 years later, is there any way around this? Or plans to implement it?
Dave,
The core product does not do this yet but it should be easy to script a solution. We are in the process of propagating the availability of characteristics, comments, and attached documents, and just haven’t gotten to BOM items.
The source table has a row for BOM Item. Set source_charass to BMI on this row. Then add a script called bomItem that creates a Characteristics tab, adds a CharacteristicsWidget to that tab, and calls setType('BMI') on that characteristics widget.
Gil
Actually, we did add this feature. It was done after June of 2007, in late 2008. We just didn’t call it “Reference Designators”. We called it Reference for short. And it is manifested as tab on the Line Item of the BOM. At the Line Item level on a BOM, you will notice five tabs. Notes, Reference, Substitutions, Comments, Costs. Reference is meant to be the place for Component coordinates. You will need to adjust any forms you want this to show up on. For example, if you outsource your PCB’s to a board stuffer, you may want to provide them with the BOM print out. That does not include Reference data in the stock report/form.
Thanks to both of you! Long term I think we’ll implement Gil’s solution, but the reference field gets us up and running immediately.