Importing Bill Of Material From OrCAD

[murphyswitch]

Hello all,

My engineers would like to be able to import the bill of material that is created with a schematic is produced in OrCAD. Does anyone have an idea of how this can be done? I'm currently running version 7.5.103f. Below is a sample of the file generated:

Series 555 Controller, Murphy Number Z00000000021223 Revised: Monday, December 22, 2003
555cpue.dsn Revision: E

Murphy Switch of California, Inc.
41343 12th Street West
Palmdale, California 93551



Bill Of Materials December 22,2003 13:46:27 Page1

Item Quantity Reference Part
______________________________________________

1 1 BT1 BATTERY 20154
2 5 C1,C7,C43,C61,C68 68 uf 11818
3 25 C2,C3,C4,C6,C9,C10,C13, .1 uf 11509
C15,C16,C17,C20,C21,C23,
C36,C41,C42,C47,C52,C58,
C63,C64,C73,C76,C79,C81
4 38 C5,C8,C11,C14,C18,C19, .01 uf 11517
C22,C24,C25,C27,C30,C31,
C32,C35,C38,C40,C44,C46,
C48,C51,C53,C54,C55,C56,
C57,C59,C60,C62,C65,C66,
C67,C70,C71,C72,C74,C75,
C77,C82

 

[vbajock]

You need a programmer, not a forum. First thing to check is whether ORcad has an ODBC or OLEDB link to the BOM. If not, you've got to dump the data into text files and code a program to parse the files and build the BOM from it.

 

[dgillz]

As vbajock says, if your CAD software is ODBC compliant, then you can import directly from it to Macola, with a little coding. In fact there is already an AutoCAD to Macola link written, but I have very little experience with it.

Software Sales, Training, Implementation and Support for Exact Macola, eSynergy, and Crystal Reports

http://www.trianglepartners.com

 

[murphyswitch]

Thanks guys. Unfortunately, there are no database links available to OrCAD. The only output we have is in the form of the test file sample I attached in my original post. It would be fairly easy to strip away the header information by hand. Is there a tool out there for importing the remaining data?

 

[dgillz]

Do you know what type of database OrCAD is? There is very little chance that it cannot be connected to at all, and once we figure out how to connect to it, we can go from there.

Software Sales, Training, Implementation and Support for Exact Macola, eSynergy, and Crystal Reports

http://www.trianglepartners.com

 

[Rob7]

dgillz is right, normally you can connect to just about any database out there, just a matter of finding out what the database is. As far as there being a tool, there probably is not one to specificly address OrCAD to Progression but custom code could be written to do this. The key is being able to get the data out of OrCAD.

Rob

Cytec Corporation
rbrown@cyteccorp.com

 

[MacolaHelp]

There are some other considerations you need to create BOMs externally, including validating the item master & inventory location files. That's why the BOMlink for autocad is 10-50K & they claim 18,000 installs. This is a fairly large undertaking.

Check out a google search on orcad+macola. I got 36 hits there. Maybe one of those outfits has already done this. I saw a techie type doc that looked like you could take orcad info into excel & from there into macola. It would probably be wise to work with a programmer who has some knowledge of both orcad & macola.

 

[abaldwin]

We currently use Access and Excel to import BOMs into Macola VERY successfully. As a matter-of-fact the BOM structure file is the only file we have that constantly passes the file validation without errors.

Basically the idea is to create an excel spreadsheet containing the bom structure and then the code to import that to the bom file.

I would suggest two passes of the file to get the import correct. The first pass checks to see if the items exist in Macola. If they do not then do not proceed. If ALL the parts exist then write the entries. The BOM structure file layout is pretty simple.

One of the problems you may have above is all the comma's. I do not like to have comma's in my data since it interferes with SQL statements (comma is a delimeter in SQL).

When creating OrCad layouts it is possible to have an enormouse amount of components on any given board or other electronic piece they are creating, hence the need for making sure that the parts used already exist in Macola.

What version of OrCad. The last one I used was 8.something.

Andy

Andy Baldwin

 

[murphyswitch]

Thanks for all your input. I've turned this over to my design guy and if we have further questions, I'll let you know.