Working with a Bill of Materials Object on a Draftsman Document in Altium NEXUS

Parent page: Draftsman Objects

A Bill Of Materials table split over two BOM objects. In the above example, the BOM content is filtered to include the items from the Top side Board Assembly View.

Summary

A Draftsman Bill Of Materials (BOM) is an automatically generated table object that lists the physical assembly items in a PCB design. The table data is directly derived from the project PCB file or if one is present in the current project, an Active BOM document. A Draftsman BOM Table can also represent the constituent items from a specified design Variation or a placed Board Assemby View.

The BOM table's visual style and included data content is configurable in (or via) the Properties panel. 

Availability

A Bill Of Materials table is available for placement in a PCB project Draftsman document from the Editor as follows:

• Choose the Place » Bill Of Materials command from the main menus.
• Click the  button in the table objects drop down menu on the Active Bar located at the top of the design space. Click and hold an Active Bar button to access other related commands. Once a command has been used, it will become the topmost item on that section of the Active Bar.
  
• Right-click in the drawing design space then select Place » Bill Of Materials from the context menu.
• Click the Bill Of Materials () entry in the tables drop-down menu () on the Drawing Annotations toolbar (View » Toolbars » Drawing Annotations to enable).

Placement

After launching the command, BOM data is retrieved from the source PCB file or Active BOM document, the cursor will change to a cross-hair and the generated BOM table is attached to the cursor. Move the cursor to the desired position then click to confirm the placement.

Graphical Editing

The position of a placed Bill Of Materials may be graphically changed by selecting the table in the design space then dragging it to a new location. Note that the table cannot be graphically resized, but will automatically scale to accommodate the font style/size as specified in the Properties panel.

To help manage the vertical size of a BOM table in a Draftsman document, the listing sequence can be split over a number of table objects – see Split BOM Tables.

Non-Graphical Editing

Properties page: Bill Of Materials Properties

The non-graphical method of editing a Bill Of Materials table is available in the Draftsman Properties panel, which provides a range of editable properties, style and design content settings for placed Draftsman objects.

The Properties panel when a Bill Of Materials table is selected.

To open the Properties panel and access the properties of a placed Bill Of Materials table:

• Double-click on the Bill Of Materials table object in the design space.
• Right-click on the Bill Of Materials then select Item Properties from the context menu.

If the Properties panel is already active:

• Click on the Bill Of Materials table to access its properties in the panel.

To manually open the Properties panel, select View » Panels » Properties from the main menus or click the button at the bottom right of the design space then select Properties from the pop-up menu.