The BOM migration tools migrate drawings to AutoCAD Mechanical toolset and generates BOMs for them.
You perform the migration in two stages.
During the first stage, you use a wizard known as the Extraction Template Wizard. You use this wizard to “train” AutoCAD Mechanical toolset to understand your drawings, so that it can extract information required to generate the BOM subsystem. You run the Extraction Template Wizard on a drawing that is typical of the drawings you want to migrate. As you proceed with the wizard, it gives you an opportunity to locate and map information (referred to as “text objects” in the wizard) to the component properties in the BOM.
Finally, this wizard produces a file that is known as an Extraction Template. It also produces a drawing that is known as a Reference Drawing. This is the drawing relative to which the extraction template is defined. The reference drawing is a copy of the typical drawing, modified to contain a drafting standard, and thereby a BOM.
During the second stage, you use a wizard known as the BOM Migration wizard. This wizard uses the extraction template and the reference drawing you created earlier, and migrates all the drawings in the project folder you select. If the wizard hits a problem that prevents it from doing a proper migration, it reports the problem before it does the actual migration. Hence you are able to go back and correct the problem, or ignore the problem and continue.
Before you begin any of the migration wizards, you must select a typical drawing to run the Extraction Template Wizard on.
What if there is more than one type of drawings in the project, and you can't pick just one as a typical? For example, what if assembly drawings and part drawings have 2 different title block formats?
You can have up to 3 Extraction Templates per project. This means that you can have 3 variations of drawings in a project. You pick a typical drawing for each variation, and run the Extraction Template Wizard on each of them. When you run the BOM migration wizard, you select all the extraction templates that typify the drawings in the drawing project.
Drawings are matched to the corresponding extraction template by comparing the title block of the drawing with the title block of the corresponding reference drawing. When a match is found, the wizard uses the corresponding extraction template to extract information from that drawing and migrate it.