Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Best Of
Re: how do i remove these parts of a sweep?
If you're looking to remove the stubs of the handle then a delete face with heal turned on will also work.
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
@Caden_Armstrong (and everyone else), thanks for your input.
Our CAD to ERP process is… let's just say sub-optimal… and basically completely manual at this point. It's also not really feasible to integrate CAD directly with ERP for reasons I'm not going to go into here….
However we are looking at the possibility at adding a layer in between (i.e. PLM) to make the part of the process we have control over more automated, I'm asking here as it would require some significant adjustments to our CAD practices and I was interested in seeing what's worked for others.
The takeaway seems to be that there is no real helpful "out of the box" functionality that would handle this automatically, but if we store the information in a custom property (which sounds like something even I could handle in FS, we'll just have to figure out what makes the most sense to our users here), we should be able to use it down the road.
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
Interesting, so if there are four separate "pieces" of gasket modeled (for example if the 4 sides of a door each use a separate piece rather than trying to bend one long piece all the way around) you would have 4 separate BOM lines, each qty 1 and having the corresponding length in the PN?
Or would you combine them in a single composite part with the length in the PN.
The risk I see with adding it to the PN field is that purchasing might be a bit confused if they have to parse the part number to understand what to buy AND how much to get.
For use we need to get the correct information in the QTY. column in ERP. We may have to continue doing it manually for now. We'll have to decide if we are going to use an item and enter it manually there or look at way to get a property filled in automatically with the length and use that outside of CAD (either by having the length part of the description or using a separate "length" column…
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
I've been putting the length in the PN. For example: 20-2353-23in for a 23" length of gasket. Our ERP system is manually entered, not tied into OS.
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
Right so you would have QTY1 of "Gasket, 7.3ft", or whatever. You'd still need a manual edit somewhere to get the correct qty of gasket in ERP but that would help… You could probably create a new column with the length property and maybe have some rule in the ERP input to convert that to a correct "quantity"…
I guess you wouldn't even need the "exclude from properties" as you would just have the one part with the rolled up qty included in the BOM (and set the other ones to exclude from BOM). Otherwise you would end up with QTY 4 of "Gasket, 7.3ft" which would be misleading. Creating a composite might be another way but it's a different approach (i.e. not inserting different lengths of the same part in the assembly), at least you could use FS to compute that length property (with different level of automation depending how much effort you put into it)…
Thanks for the input, I definitely have some things to think about!
@Pat_Couture , the "items" way doesn't seem to provide a lot of benefit if you still have to input the value manually, I guess it does remove the need from manual editing downstream so that's something…
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
@eric_pesty Now that configurations can be rolled into a single part number, I was assuming there would be a config that would be a single part with the total length. That would be what would show up on the BOM. Definitely a bunch of overhead to make it happen, but it seems like we're closer.

Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
Computing the total length from the CAD model is the "easy" part. What to do with BOM and part numbers is the tricky bit…
The BOM would need the ability to support overriding the "quantity" with a custom property…
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
For a gasket material, I would think that a special custom feature could be created which would take edges and/or curves and model sweeps which are all separate parts, but somehow it tallies up the overall length.

Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
Hi Eric,
We have the same issue, for now we deal with it outside of Onshape but it's people dependent and prone to mistakes. The best workaround from time to time is to use virtual components. They can be setup to show length instead of quantity of an item. But even with this, we don't have a proper way to automate the process up to the order. We still have to treat it manually.
Re: How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
Do you have a ERP integration or do you manually enter the BOM? An ERP integration should be able to handle situations like these (albeit with some customization).
I've done around ~50 CAD-ERP integrations, and based on your description of how the ERP is setup (part number is per foot of material), Simon's suggestion makes the most sense. In Onshape, have a column with total length and the ERP integration should be able to recognize this and replace the quantity with the number of feet as it goes into the ERP.
Creating new part numbers for each possible length will become a headache in the future. I've spent a lot of time helping with data cleanup during migrations with companies who have done this.