Add a custom field to a part?

[motusRP]

Is there a way to add a custom field to the Part database? I'd like to add an ECO field to track the Engineering Change Order that released the part. Maybe an ECR field would be useful to track any ECR's logged to request changes in the next revision would be useful as well.

But in general, is there any way to do this? I've been looking at Parameters but that seems to be something i'd have to add from the Admin panel on a per-part basis...

[motusRP]

I'll leave the discussion open for others (I couldn't find this discussed in a way that I understood it when I was looking previously, maybe others will benefit), but I think I understand now how to do this.

Parameters is the way. I created two Parameter Templates in the Admin section, ECR (Engineering Change Request) and an ECO (Engineering Change Order). Then I added them to an existing part. I was thinking this would be tedious to add to all parts, but I think it might be okay as you'd only want to change it when you're doing a change to the part anyway.

For an ECR/ECO process, after playing with this for a bit, I think i'll set the IPN to be the part number and the revision together, ie. 10-12345-002-A3. Change Requests can be tracked with an ECR property (which would correlate to an ECR document listing the requested changes). When a part is revised and the changes are made, as part of completing the ECO I would duplicate the part, give it a new unique IPN with the next revision (say10-12345-002-A4), and mark the old one inactive. Then I can add the ECO parameter with an ECO number that would link to the ECO documentation releasing that revision.

Does anyone see an issue with that? This will end up adding two records to each part number's Parameter table... Are there any issues with this table getting large?

[wolflu05]

Haven't followed all from your comment, but that sounds a bit like your trying to build your own #5028 with approvals.

[motusRP]

Haven't followed all from your comment, but that sounds a bit like your trying to build your own #5028 with approvals.

Somewhat, yes, but we need more than just a different revision, we need to correlate that to a document (or documents) describing what changed in the revision. That document may be referenced by multiple parts that all get revised on the same change order.

I tried this on a couple of parts and it seems to work quite well. The older revision parts show as inactive, which is good. Oh, but I guess the new revision, if it's a copy of the old revision, will lose it's place on any BOM's where it's used. Okay, so in that case the copy could be the old revision, and you edit the original to increment the revision. That'll be a little more work, but still do-able. Until we get a proper revision management system added to Inventree.

(The other issue with #5028 is that it's a year old and has no activity... Not sure if anyone is looking at it.)

[matmair]

Not sure where you are getting it is inactive, we are currently adding the prices needed, the last comment is from 2wks ago

[motusRP]

Not sure where you are getting it is inactive, we are currently adding the prices needed, the last comment is from 2wks ago

My apologies! When I loaded the page for some reason it stopped after the first comment from 3 weeks ago. Not sure why. From my perspective it looked like it wasn't active for a year and then had one comment 3 weeks ago. I reloaded the page and now I see a lot more detail from that timeframe. Very strange, I don't know why github did that. Again, my apolgies, I appreciate the work being done on this, and Inventree in general! :)