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Generate BOM for Altium 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.json is committed in your Altium project repo.
- name: Checkout
  uses: actions/checkout@v3

- name: Generate BOM
  uses: https://hub.allspice.io/Actions/generate-bom-altium@v0.2
  with:
    # The path to the Altium project file in your repo.
    project_path: Archimajor.PrjPcb
    # [optional] A path to a JSON file mapping columns to the component attributes
    # they are from. This file must be provided.
    # Default: 'columns.json'
    columns: .allspice/columns.json
    # [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 columns.json file. This file maps the Component Attributes in the SchDoc files (right) to the columns of the BOM (left). An example for columns.json file content is:

{
  "Part ID": ["_part_id"],
  "Part Number": ["PART", "MANUFACTURER #"],
  "Manufacturer": ["Manufacturer", "MANUFACTURER"],
  "Designator": ["Designator"],
  "Description": ["PART DESCRIPTION"]
}

In this file, the keys are the names of the columns in the BOM, and the values are a list of the names of the attributes in the SchDoc files that should be mapped to that column. For example, if your part number is stored either in the PART or MANUFACTURER # attribute, you would add both of those to the list. If there is only one attribute, you can omit the list and just use a string. The script checks these attributes in order, and uses the first one it finds. So if both PART and MANUFACTURER # are defined, it will use PART.

Note that py-allspice also adds two static attributes: _part_id and _description. These correspond to the Library Reference and description fields of the component. The underscore is added ahead of the name to prevent these additional attributes from overriding any of your own. You can use these like:

{
  "Description": ["PART DESCRIPTION", "_description"],
  "Part Number": ["PART", "_part_id"]
}

Where the BOM generation will use the attribute "PART DESCRIPTION" if it exists for a given component, and "_description" otherwise. Same for "PART" and "_part_id".

By default, the script picks up a columns.json 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 script to specify where it is.

Group By

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

- name: Generate BOM
  uses: https://hub.allspice.io/Actions/generate-bom-altium@v0.2
  with:
    project_path: Archimajor.PrjPcb
    columns: .allspice/columns.json
    group_by: 'Part ID'

Which will generate a BOM squashed by components with matchin 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-altium@v0.2
  with:
    project_path: Archimajor.PrjPcb
    columns: .allspice/columns.json
    output_file_name: bom-lite.csv
    variant: 'LITE'

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