Reported Length

In one of my previous post I’ve shown you how to change length parameter format for steel shapes in Content Center (CC) so that assembly Bill of Materials (BOM) will have no trailing zeros and round up the value to a 1 mm increment.

On that post I gave you a bit of ilogic code that can change formatting of files you might have generated already which can come in hand and can be used with code injector.

At that time I didn’t realized that you might not use the assembly BOM to report your lengths but use the drawing Parts List so in this post we will look at doing just that.

If your company uses Parts Lists then you might be lucky and saved yourself a good couple of day’s work where you needed to copy all the default libraries to a custom read-write and then editing all the templates to report correct length parameters.

The Parts Lists can be formatted just like the parameter display and you can show/hide, trailing or leading zeros, units string or even change units to: in, mm, cm, m, ft, yard, mi, or microns.

Double click on your table or right click and choose “Edit Parts List...” either on the browser or graphical window.

Right click the quantity column and choose “Format Column...”. In the format column window you can specify a new name for the column, change text justification and most importantly you can change units formatting.

Click on “Apply Units Formatting” to activate the submenus. Now you can change trailing or leading zeros, change units type, units and precision. It can be configure to report a different measurement unit, to change decimal from "." to "," and you can choose if you need to have the units string displayed at all.

If you use the Materials List table style supplied with Inventor you will have to modify the Substitution tab in the format cell window. In the Substitution window you might have “Enable Value Substitution” and “When exists, use value of” PL. This is helpful for those that do Tube and Pipe where the reported parameter for pipe length is PL.

And of course there’s a catch. Your units will be rounded but you need to be careful because you can have it rounded up or rounded down. Both can cost you and rounding up an expensive material can be just as expensive as rounding down and not having enough to complete your design.

My settings will keep units to mm but will remove trailing zeros and set precision to 0 decimals. Most workshops will not need or manufacture to less than 1mm increments but this is for you to decide.

In this way you can keep the default formatting of CC and keep working with the out of the box libraries without the hassle of copying or editing them.

Later,
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