Generate a Material Report

Before creating the bill of materials, collect the materials of the project or the active drawing-model pair in the material register by using the Collecting Materials function.

The material data have been collected in the material register with a separate row for each element, which means that the same material can appear in several different rows. In the bill of materials, all completely identical materials are added up and displayed in one row.

  1. Do either of the following:
    • Select Output | Materials | Report.
    • Select the function in the project's document browser:
      1. Move the cursor over the title Reports.
      2. Right-click to open the context-sensitive menu.
      3. Select Generate Material Report.
  2. Select the output format for the bill of materials. The program collects the fields in accordance with the selected format in a temporary database. You can view the collected materials in a database view.
  3. Close the database view by clicking OK. The bill of materials is opened in the text editing program defined in the setup file.
  4. Close the text editing program.
  5. Save the project by pressing Ctrl+S, and the project document browser is updated. You can open the file for viewing from the document browser. Open the Reports branch in the document browser, and double-click the name of the file.

Note

  • The output formats for the bill of materials are customer-specific. The different output format options have been defined in the setup file KOMPOT. The file determines the data to be collected in each bill, the list format file determining the layout of the bill, and the name of the file in which the bill is saved. The files are saved in the project folder with the txt file extension.

  • Alternatively, you can add the selected list directly to the drawing without opening it in the text editing program. The list is saved with a file name defined in the setup file KOMPOT. You can add the list to the drawing by defining the text adding function instead of the file name in the setup file:

    file= add_text(1)

    The number inside the parenthesis defines the text type: 1 = normal text, 2 = framed text. This setting starts up the text adding procedure instead of opening the list in the text editing program. Select the location of the text in the drawing.

  • By default, the material reports are created using the UTF-8 character encoding. You can define a character encoding that differs from the default for each output format option by using the keyword charformat= NAME in the KOMPOT setup file. NAME can be one of the following:

    "latin1" - WINDOWS-1252 standard

    "purelatin1" - ISO-8859-1 standard

    "latin2" - ISO-8859-2 standard

    "utf8" - UTF-8 standard (default)