All Together: Collections in Tacton
Whoever said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts must not have been responsible for automating costed Bills of Materials (BOMs). Very popular requests in design automation revolve around generating total costs, total weights, or some other value that pulls properties from the components in a design. The trick with automation, of course is that you never know what the values are going to be, which parts will even exist, or how many of each part you will need. These all change very dramatically with the inputs. Tacton’s Collections are a nice solution for dealing with these challenges.
TactonStudio and TactonWorks both give you the ability to add and multiply within you constraints or in post-calculation fields, but totaling up large numbers of values is time consuming, a maintenance nightmare and hardly very scaleable. Enter into this picture, the collection. Collections allow you to group together like, related, or even unrelated components. Once grouped, actions and special properties exist for the collections. If you need to determine the sum of a value on each part in a collection, simply use the syntax MyCollection.Sum(MyProperty). And if the property is quantity dependent, for example weight or cost, you can utilize the MyCollection.Quantified_Sum(MyProperty) function to multiply the quantity of each part by the property value. This will easily result in accurate totals that can be used to limit weights, to use weight to drive shipping methods, or to determine total costs for optimization purposes, for example.
As if being able to create collections wasn’t cool enough, Tacton has provided some free collections for you to use automatically. The ALL collection is a collection that contains, obviously enough, all components. The THIS collection includes the selected part and all of its sub-parts. The THIS collection can be very helpful to work with a single branch of your design tree, or when working with individual execution steps.
As with everything, where and how these tools are to be used must be determined on a case-by-case basis. So add Collections to your Tacton toolkit and increase the power and simplicity of your implementation. Of course, if all of this sounds good, but you’d rather have someone else do it for you, please contact us to help with your Tacton configuration needs.
Tags: BOM, Design Automation, SolidWorks, Tacton, Tacton Collections, Tacton configuration, Tacton Studio, TactonWorks
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