Customizing SOLIDWORKS Inspection Reports – Part 3

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First Article Inspection Report

Limiting the Number of Rows Per Sheet and Grouping Dimensional Characteristics

SOLIDWORKS Inspection Logo

Written by: Gordon Pursel, Application Engineer at DASI Solutions

Missed Part 1 & 2? Check out Part 1 introducing the Inspection Report Editor here or Part 2 on how to add a Report Footer in the Template Editor here.

In Part 3 of this series, I’ll share advanced techniques to customize SOLIDWORKS Inspection reports to limit the inspection characteristics numbers per sheet and group balloons by characteristic values such as manufacturing operations or inspection methods.

In the proceeding steps, you can follow along using the AS9102.xlt template to practice these techniques on the AS9102 Form 3 worksheet.

Start the Template Editor

To begin customizing an excel report template, select the Template Editor from the Inspection Standalone Application or within the SOLIDWORKS Inspection Add-In, then select a template. To review how the template editor maps the inspection project information to a report template refer to Part 1 of this blog series.

Standalone Application: Template Editor Dialogue

SOLIDWORKS Inspection Template Editor

In this example, the “characteristic number” token was inserted into the cell below “5. Char No.”. With the Template Editor’s radial button “Vertical Based Template” selected, this token will extract all the Char # values from the inspection project into this column starting from this cell containing the token.

First Article Inspection Report

When publishing a report from the standalone application the Bill of Characteristics “Char #” column will be mapped to the Excel column using the uniquely identified “@Uid” token.

Standalone Application: Bill of Characteristics

Inspection: Bill of Characteristics

How to Limit the Characteristics Numbers (Char #) Per Sheet

To take control over the number of rows or filter how the data is exported from the Bill of Characteristics Table into a specific Excel sheet, you can manually modify the tokens createdwith the Template Editor.

To control the number of Char #’s in each sheet of the report, open the report template and manually modify the tokens to include a formula for the token’s value. In the below example, the modified token will now only populate the Char #’s less than 11.

First Article Inspection Report Example

When following these steps in the Standalone Application or the SOLIDWORKS Add-In, the tokens will be different as illustrated below. This means you will need to build templates for both applications, if you intend to use both the Standalone and SOLIDWORKS Add-in.

Standalone Application

iex:INSPECTIONXPERT/INSPECTION_SHEET/ATTRIBUTES/ATTRIBUTE[@Uid<'11']/@Uid

SOLIDWORKS Add-In

iex:INSPECTIONXPERT/SAMPLE_SHEET/CAD/ATTRIBUTES/ATTRIBUTE[@prefix<'11']/@prefix

 

It’s very import to note that you must add the stream [@Uid<’11’] or [@[prefix<’11’] respectively for all other tokens in Form 3 page one. To test your modified Form3 sheet, publish a ballooned project to your template to confirm that the token only populates the rows where the Char # is less than eleven. Once the From3 sheet is working as expected, edit the template again and copy the Form3 sheet to a new tab named Form3-Page2.

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