Altium x Inventree Parts Library Database

[gid204]

I'm looking at incorporating our Inventree server to store electronic parts and sync this with Altium. We are currently using Altium365 as our parts database but this has limitations, notably all the ordering/stocktaking functionality and label printing.

I'm very new to databases in general, this is the first 'project' I've incorporated which has required me to delve into them.

Hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction of what I should start looking up/into.
Altium can connect to an external database (see here), so I suppose there might be away to get them talking, hopefully not with too much trouble...

Maybe someone here has already achieved this?

Cheers!

[matmair]

Most users seem to use KiCad, I am not aware of a Altium integration. We had experiments around database connections in the community before KiCad gained HTTP libraries. Inventrees database is not really designed for this use case so I am not sure how easy integration will be.
Please report back if this goes anywhere, would be interesting to know for future reference.

[gid204]

I've posted the same question in a forum on the Altium side

I don't believe Inventree supports OLE DB, does it? I think this is the only way to connect an external DB to Altium.

Someone suggested converting Inventree DB into an excel sheet and then using that to create an Altium DB. I'd probably need to automate this somehow to pickup on any changes (when I edit or add a new part in Inventree).

[matmair]

I can’t/wont access that forum as I am required to sign up to even read anything - classic altium.

if you really must some kind of export solution probably works but staying in the altium 365 world is probably more straight forward.

[gid204]

This video might get me on track....
Altium needs a driver to talk to MySQL, it looks like you can use a MySQL to ODBC connector driver

I'm not sure if I'd be able to login and access my Inventree instance from there though...

I've installed Inventree on a Ubuntu server installed bare-metal, so I'd probably need to find a driver that supports linux.

[SergeoLacruz]

We leave the CAD as it is and use the two in parallel: Inventree and CAD (Altium in our case). These are mainly independent. A new part is created in both systems.
Inventree:
Creates the IPN
Holds Datasheets, additional docs, stock, parameters
Manages purchase orders

CAD:
Holds schematic symbols, layout footprints, simulation data as far as needed

Part creation is done manually in both systems. As there are usually no changes later on, this is OK.
BOM is pushed to Inventree from CAD schematic using the Inventree API. That is the only automatic sync point we have so far.