Data Management - Suppliers

Modified by Annika Krilov on Sep 25, 2015
Contents

Parent page: IntegratedLibrary Preferences


The Data Management - Suppliers page of the Preferences dialog.

Summary

The Data Management – Suppliers page of the Preferences dialog provides controls to configure the Suppliers made available when using the Live Links to Supplier Data feature. 

Access

The Data Management – Suppliers page is part of the main Preferences dialog (File | ) and is accessed by clicking the Suppliers entry under the Data Management folder, in the left hand pane of the dialog.

Options/Controls

Available Suppliers

This region of the page lists all Suppliers that can be used as part of design data management to access and integrate supply chain intelligence. Altium currently has agreements with the following Suppliers:

  • Allied Electronics
  • Arrow Electronics
  • Digi-Key Corporation
  • Farnell
  • Mouser Electronics
  • Newark
  • R-S Components
  • TME

These agreements enable designers to access and search these Suppliers' web-databases directly from within PCBWorks.

Note that a Supplier will only appear in the list, provided the corresponding extension for it is currently installed. Within PCBWorks, management of extensions for the software is performed from within the dedicated Extensions & Updates area – one of several views available under PCBWorks's Home page. Access this area by clicking the Extensions & Updates link, in the Tasks pane of PCBWorks's Home page. The Home page itself is accessed by clicking View | System | , from the main menus.
In the dialog, you will notice an ODBC supplier. If you are signed in, and connected to, a licensed Altium Vault, you can additionally opt to source data directly from your company's own internal parts database. This is done by linking the Altium Vault's local Part Catalog to an ODBC source, through a Database Link file (*.DbLink).

Check the Enable option for a Supplier to be able to search that Supplier's database from within PCBWorks, and link PCBWorks components to matching supplier items. You can choose to enable any combination of these Suppliers, for use with the Live Links to Supplier Data feature. By including more Suppliers for use with the feature, you are able to compare and shop for the best deals on the components required by your design.

Moving forward, Altium continues to drive the expansion of its Supplier support. As agreements arise with additional electronic component Suppliers this list will grow, giving you an ever-wider choice of where to source your required design 'building blocks'.

Use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to move a selected Supplier up or down in the list respectively. The order determines the priority given to each Supplier when returning matching real-world parts in a parts search.

Supplier Options

If you have an account with a particular Supplier, you may be entitled to special pricing or products that are not available in these suppliers' public catalogs. If this applies to you, you should ask your supplier's sales representative for the requisite credentials that can be used with their Web Service. Once you have this information, enter it into the additional fields for that particular Supplier. The following is a summary of the additional fields presented in this region when selecting, in turn, each of the various Suppliers (in the Available Suppliers region):

  • Allied - User Name and Password.
  • Arrow - User Name, Password, Country (or region).
  • Digi-Key - User Name, Password, Region, Language.
  • Farnell - Customer Id, Secret key, Country (or region).
  • Mouser - User Name, Password, Region, Currency, Language.
  • Newark - Customer Id, Secret key, Country (or region).
  • RS-Components - Region.
  • TME - API Key, Country (or region), Currency. Obtain a temporary TME token from the TME website. Once you have this information, click the ... button to access the Temporary token to API key dialog. Enter your TME token and click OK – the token will be transformed to the required API key.
If using these additional options, don't forget to select a country or region that applies to you, where applicable, so that products available for that locale are made available to you
Making use of these additional supplier options is a wholly optional exercise. You are not required to fill out these details in order to use a Supplier, they simply offer additional benefits for those users that are existing customers of that Supplier, should they wish to access them.
For the ODBC supplier, the region simply reflects connectivity to the source database, in terms of Connection String, Table Name, and Datasource Fields Mapping.

Suggested Keywords

To speed searching for parts in Suppliers' databases, the software fills a suggested keyword into the Keywords field at the top of the Add Supplier Links dialog, based on the following fields/parameters of the source PCBWorks design component:

  • Comment
  • Description
  • Name

Use the fields in this region to configure the order in which these are effectively tried. By default, the Comment will be used as the search criteria first. If the source component has no comment, then the next attempt uses its Description. If this is also blank, the component's Name will be used.

Further refine this initial Keywords entry as required, in the Add Supplier Links dialog, to better target the desired Supplier Item(s).

 

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