The depth of the hierarchy was limited by the need for separate utility relationships, fields, and script steps at each descending level while walking the lists of materials and subassemblies required by a parent Assembly Item. The overhead in FM 3 was not trivial: multiple global fields, multiple relationships, and lots of similar-but-not-identical script steps were required to facilitate the process. This arrangement is often called an “exploded” or “multi-level” BoM that might look like this:Īdding a parent Assembly Item to Inventory requires sufficient quantities of all descendant materials and Assembly Items, which requires walking the entire multi-level BoM to ensure that sufficient quantities of each material is available to produce the required quantity of that material’s parent Assembly Item. The inclusion of other Assembly Items (which might also contain Assembly Items) means that a full Bill Of Materials (BoM) for a “parent” Assembly Item is best represented as a hierarchical list that clarifies the relationships between each component and its “ancestor” and “descendant” Items. I personally have benefited enormously from his expertise, and am pleased to feature his first appearance as a guest author here on FileMaker Hacks.īack when FileMaker 3 was new, I added inventory management to a FileMaker template that allowed an Assembly Item to be a collection of other Items, including other Assembly Items.
See comments for details.Įditor’s note: Geoff Gerhard of Creative Solutions is one of those “quiet” developers who has been helpfully sharing his knowledge in online FileMaker forums for more than 20 years.
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