As our company (thanks @SJenkins!) is getting more proficient with creating product configurators, the complexity keeps going up. We created a configurator for our simpler custom fabric building covers and tarps. The folks on the manufacturing floor are used to getting dimensioned prints created by the CAD department, but we were trying to remove this burden from CAD (and shave a week off the lead time).
Has anyone done a dynamic drawing or SSRS report (attachment?) with configurator? Or are we approaching this wrong?
My simple idea was a generic drawing as an image on SSRS with dimensions noted by A-Width, B-Height, C-FabricType, etc and have a text box below that’s the configurator comments. Ideally dimensions would be in the right place… Sort of like a parametric cad program without needing to involve the CAD department.
Great question @askulte. I want to recall that it can manage some parametric drawing work using the QLink CAD module and some variable mappings - but we never really looked into it.
To get it to work in SSRS just like you mentioned, I would think we could build a BAQ-based RDD that used the PCInvputValue view to look up and include the parameters we wanted, including even the PNG/JPG image of the object, then SSRS could just put the values in the appropriate fields surrounding the image control… something like that?
We are doing something like that, but “outside” the system via REST. I use .netdxf to make the drawing and then TrueView to make pdf’s from the layout drawings in the DXF. The workers get a PDF, the customer gets a different PDF, and the dxf is used for the plasma table.
After a certain level of complexity I think it become smarter to keep your service out of Epicor and only communicate the details Epicor needs to know via REST, but thats just my opinion.
@Evan_Purdy - That’s awesome! Any chance you’d be willing to share more details with us (or maybe present at one of the user groups)? That sounds exactly what we’d want, but this would be entirely new ground for us to figure out. We could definitely start with a dxf out of the CAD group. They have templates for these ready to go.
Also, there has been some exploration by some companies of doing something using a product like https://www.liquidpixels.com/ which supports the live generation of an image that can be displayed on a webpage by sending fairly small scripts to their image generation site. I personally dont know anyone who has completed such a project.
