Generate BOM for E-CAD Projects

Generate a BOM output file for an Altium project on AllSpice Hub using AllSpice Actions.

Usage

Add the following steps to your actions:

# Checkout is only needed if columns.yml is committed in your Altium project repo.
- name: Checkout
  uses: actions/checkout@v3

- name: Generate BOM
  uses: https://hub.allspice.io/Actions/generate-bom@v0.5
  with:
    # The path to the project file in your repo (.PrjPcb for Altium, .DSN for OrCad).
    source_path: Archimajor.PrjPcb
    # [optional] A path to a YAML file mapping columns to the component
    # attributes they are from.
    # Default: 'columns.yml'
    columns: .allspice/columns.yml
    # [optional] The path to the output file that will be generated.
    # Default: 'bom.csv'
    output_file_name: bom.csv
    # [optional] A comma-separated list of columns to group the BOM by. If empty
    # or not present, the BOM will be flat.
    # Default: ''
    group_by: "Part ID"
    # [optional] The variant of the project to generate the BOM for. If empty
    # or not present, the BOM will be generated for the default variant.
    # Default: ''
    variant: ""

Customizing the Attributes Extracted by the BOM Script

This script relies on a YAML file to specify the columns in the BOM and which attributes or properties of the components they are populated from. This file is typically called columns.yml and can be checked into your repo. To learn more about YAML, check out the AllSpice Knowledge Base.

The format of this YAML file is as follows:

columns:
  - name: "Manufacturer"
    part_attributes:
      - "Manufacturer"
      - "MANUFACTURER"
  - name: "Part Number"
    part_attributes:
      - "PART"
      - "MANUFACTURER #"
      - "_part_id"
  - name: "Designator"
    part_attributes: "Designator"
  - name: "Description"
    part_attributes:
      - "PART DESCRIPTION"
      - "_description"

First, you have the key columns: which is mapped to a list. Each element of the list has two key/value pairs. The first is name, which will be the column name in the output file. Next, you have part_attributes. This can either be just a string (like in the case of the Designator column) or a list of strings (like in the other cases).

If part_attributes is a string, that property or attribute of the component is used as the value for that column. If that property is not present in a particular part, that column will be blank for that part. If part_attributes is a list, those properties will be checked in the order they are defined for each part. The first property found is used as the value for that column in the row for that part. So if both PART and MANUFACTURER # are defined, it will use PART.

An example for OrCad columns.yml file content is:

columns:
  - name: "Part Number"
    part_attributes:
      - "Part Number"
      - "_name"
  - name: "Designator"
    part_attributes: "Part Reference"
  - name: "Type"
    part_attributes: "Part Type"
  - name: "Value"
    part_attributes: "Value"

By default, the action will pick up a columns.yml file from the working directory. If you want to keep it in a different place or rename it, you can pass the --columns argument to the step in the workflow to specify where it is.

Py-allspice injected attributes

Note that py-allspice also adds a few static attributes, which are taken from the part itself, and not from the properties or attributes. For Altium projects, _part_id and _description are available, which correspond to the Library Reference and Description fields of the component. For OrCAD projects, _name is available, which corresponds to the name of the component.

The underscore is added ahead of the name to prevent these additional attributes from overriding any of your own.

Customizing sorting, filtering and grouping

If you need more control over the BOM, you can configure each column with the following attributes. You can mix and match as many of these configuration options as you want.

Sorting

Add the sort attribute to a column to sort the BOM by that column. The value of the attribute should be asc or desc.

columns:
  - name: "Part Number"
    part_attributes:
      #  - "Part Number"
      - "_name"
    sort: "asc"

If multiple columns have the sort attribute, the BOM will be sorted by the columns in the order they are defined.

The default is no sorting. In that case, the order of the BOM is not specified.

Filtering

To filter the BOM based on a column, add a Regular Expression pattern to the remove_rows_matching attribute of a column. As the name indicates, every row where the value of the specified column matches this regex will be removed from the BOM.

columns:
  - name: "Part Number"
    part_attributes:
      - "Part Number"
      - "_name"
    # This will remove all rows where the part number has either "TP", "MTG" or
    # "FID" anywhere in it, i.e. will remove all the test points, mounting
    # holes and fiducials.
    remove_rows_matching: "TP|MTG|FID"

Since this is a regular expression, you can make fairly complex filters. You can read more about regular expressions here.

By default, there is no filtering.

Grouped Values Configuration

You can use the grouped_values_sort, grouped_values_separator and grouped_values_allow_duplicates attributes to configure the grouped values of a column. To understand these better, consider the case of a BOM which is grouped by Part Number, and you want to have a column that lists all the Designators of a part with the same Part Number. You want the designators to be separated by a space, and you want them sorted in ascending order. You also want repeated designators to appear in the list.

columns:
  - name: "Part Number"
    part_attributes:
      - "Part Number"
      - "_name"
  - name: "Designators"
    part_attributes: "Designator"
    grouped_values_sort: "asc"
    grouped_values_separator: " "
    grouped_values_allow_duplicates: true

By default:

• Grouped values are not sorted, and the order is not specified.
• Grouped values are separated by a comma.
• Grouped values do not allow duplicates.

Group By

You can also group lines by a column value. The most common is _part_id. You can combine this with the columns YAML example above, like so:

- name: Generate BOM
  uses: https://hub.allspice.io/Actions/generate-bom@v0.5
  with:
    project_path: Archimajor.PrjPcb
    columns: .allspice/columns.yml
    group_by: "Part ID"

Which will generate a BOM squashed by components with matching Part IDs.

Variants

To generate the BOM for a variant of the project, pass the --variant argument to the script. For example:

- name: Generate BOM
  uses: https://hub.allspice.io/Actions/generate-bom@v0.5
  with:
    project_path: Archimajor.PrjPcb
    columns: .allspice/columns.yml
    output_file_name: bom-lite.csv
    variant: "LITE"

When no variant is given, the BOM is generated without considering any variants.