Advice needed regarding Bill of Materials

I'm trying to use the attribute extraction wizard within autocad to
generate a bill of materials but I can't seem to understand how to get
like items to totalize. The like items that I want to have totalized is
by Catno. Catno is our unique numbering system that production uses. I'm
starting to wonder is creating my own autolisp program isn't a better
idea. Can anyone assist me in creating a autolisp program that will
totalize like items by the catalog number or what we cat catno here. The
fields that we are really interested in having on a BOM is:

DESCRIPTOR - unique numbers like R1, R2, etc.
CATNO - Our part number used here for example each 100 Ohm, 1/4 watt, 5%
resistor has the same catno number.
DESCRIPTION - This is the technical description of the part like: 100
Ohm, 1/4 watt, 5% resistor.
MFG - This field will have the manufacturer of the part.
MFG_CATNO - This is for purchasing to make sure we have the correct part
to order.
The last field I need is the QTY - The lisp routine I am looking for
should check all attributes and sort them by the CATNO number and then
generate a total Quanity of like numbers. We are using OpenOffice which
can inport .txt or .csv files into a a spreadsheet format.

Any advice or help would greatly be appreciated. I'm sure I'm not the
only one out there with this type of problem and I hate re-inventing the
wheel.

Thanks
Mark

 

Thank You for your help. I'll look into what you sent me and play around
with it a little.

 

Mark,
If you are new to lisp, the code I sent you probably doesn't make much sense. If you can clarify for me what you would like as an end result, we can wrap this routine up.
As I understand it, you want to select a bunch of blocks, have the routine sort the blocks by their CATNO value stored in an attribute within the block, and the report the quantity of each part number.
This information could easily be written to a CSV file which Excel will automatically reformat when opened.
Andrew

 

Almost forgot. I'll be out on vacation the week of July 19th - July
23rd. I will be back in the office on Monday July 26th.

 

Mark,
Can you .zip a drawing with the 'block' you are using for the data source. This way, we can see the blockname, and how the attributes are arranged.

Bob