Structure panel

The Structure panel draws a bill of materialsBill of materialsA bill of materials tells Assemblified how to build one unit of a finished good. When a customer orders the finished-good variant, Assemblified deducts the right component quantities from inventory automatically. Read more → as a graph: the finished good at the top, its components below it, and every assembly BOMSubassemblyA reusable assembly block that composes into bigger bills: define it once, include it in any bill of materials, and Assemblified expands it into its own components at execution time. Its definition is an assembly BOM. Read more → (defines a subassembly) opened up to its own materials. It is a working surface, not a picture — you can add a component, change a quantity or remove a link without leaving it.

There is no Structure entry in the navigation

The canvas has no place of its own in the app nav, and you will not find it by scrolling the sidebar. It is always opened from something — a finished good, an assembly BOM, a material, or a selection on one of the lists. The four ways in are below.

On this page

• The four ways to open it
• What the canvas shows
• What one card tells you
• Pooled materials, and when to turn pooling off
• The node limit, collapsed assemblies and the hidden count
• Editing from the canvas
• Looking the other way: a material’s structure

The four ways to open it

• From a finished good. On a BOM’s detail page, the Structure card shows a small preview. Open opens the full canvas for that one BOM.
• From an assembly BOM. The same card, on an assembly BOM’s detail page.
• From either list, for several at once. Tick the rows you want on Bill of materials (the nav entry that opens the Finished goods list) or on Assembly BOMs, then choose Open structure in the bulk bar. Every ticked bill becomes a root of one shared graph. You can also tick Select all matching first, as long as the result stays inside the limit below.
• From a material. A material’s page opens the same canvas the other way up — see Looking the other way.

Once you are on the canvas, Add bill in the title bar adds more roots to the graph you are looking at.

Up to 50 bills in one graph

One structure graph takes at most 50 bills. Select more than that and nothing opens: the list tells you to narrow the selection instead of quietly drawing the first 50, because a graph missing rows you selected looks exactly like a complete one. Add bill on the canvas refuses past the same ceiling.

What the canvas shows

Each card is one entity — a finished good, an assembly BOM, or a materialMaterialThe atomic component of a bill of materials or an assembly BOM. Two flavours: a Shopify-linked variant, whose inventory Shopify tracks, or a virtual material, which Assemblified tracks on its own and Shopify never sees. Both sit in the same component picker and are consumed the same way. Read more → — and each line between two cards is one component link. The chip on the line reads the quantity it carries, then the waste percentage and the location pinned on that link, when either is set. Cards are colour-coded by kind, so a nested assembly BOM is recognisable at a glance in someone else’s structure.

Click a card to select it. A click never navigates, but it does change what you are looking at: everything on a path through that card — its components all the way down, and everything that consumes it all the way up — stays lit, and the rest of the graph fades. That is how you read one bill inside a graph that draws several. Selecting also shows a small toolbar beside the card: above bills and below materials.

With a keyboard, use Tab to focus a card, then Enter or Space to select it. Continue with Tab to reach Open on its toolbar when you want to visit its detail page. Escape clears the selection and leaves the card unfocused. Selecting a card keeps you on the canvas.

The small previews on detail pages are read-only. Open the full canvas to select cards and, for a bill’s structure, edit its components.

Drag the canvas to pan and scroll to zoom. The control panel in the corner has zoom in, zoom out, Fit to screen, Rearrange (lay the graph out again), a lock, and the Pool materials switch described below. Cards can be dragged into your own arrangement from the start; the lock is what freezes that arrangement once you are happy with it.

What one card tells you

A card carries the entity’s image, name, SKU and — on a finished good — its product and variant name. Under that sit up to four figures, and what the second one means depends on what the card is:

Card	Left-hand figures	Right-hand figures
Finished good	Pre (pre-assembled stock on the shelf) and Available Shopify, the stock Shopify holds for that variant	Cost (the rolled-up cost of everything below it) and Retail (the bill’s price)
Assembly BOM	Pre and Buildable, how many you could build from what is in stock right now	Unit (its own cost per unit) and Total (its rolled-up cost)
Material	Avail, the on-hand quantity	Cost

Available Shopify and Buildable are not the same question. On a finished good the figure is what Shopify says is sellable; on an assembly BOM it is a calculation over the tree beneath it. Do not read one as the other.

Two more markers appear when they apply: a Pre-only badge on an assembly BOM that only ever consumes pre-assembled stock, a Sell row where such an assembly caps what can be sold, a Root chip on the cards the graph was entered at (only when there is more than one), and a small grey Shopify marker on a material whose stock Shopify manages.

Pooled materials, and when to turn pooling off

By default the canvas is pooled: a material used by three different bills in the graph is drawn once, with three lines running into it. That is usually what you want — it answers “what does this whole set of bills consume” at a glance, and it keeps a wide graph readable.

Turn pooling off and the same material is drawn once per parent instead: one card per material-and-parent pair. Use that when you care about one bill’s own BOM rather than the shared picture — for example when checking a single quantity against a line on a work order.

The node limit, collapsed assemblies and the hidden count

A graph is drawn up to 300 cards. Beyond that the canvas trims, in a fixed order, so that the result is the same every time you open the same link:

1. Assembly BOMs collapse first. A collapsed assembly keeps its own card and hides only what is reachable through it alone. Expand on its toolbar loads that part and draws it again.
2. Material leaves are dropped, deepest first, if collapsing was not enough. A banner then says how many cards are hidden.

Your roots and their direct children are never removed. If you routinely hit the limit, open fewer bills at once, or expand the one assembly you actually care about.

Editing from the canvas

Every edit is saved as you make it — there is no Save button on this page.

• Add a component. Select a finished-good or assembly BOM card and use Add component on its toolbar. The dialog offers three sources: Assembly BOM, Virtual material and Shopify variant. Pick one, then the quantity it is consumed in.
• Change a quantity. Click the quantity chip on a link and set the new one.
• Remove a link. The delete control beside a quantity takes that component out of that one parent, after a confirmation. The material or assembly BOM itself stays in your catalogue — only the link is removed, which is why removal is asked from a link rather than from a card: a pooled material has more than one parent. Once a link into a card is selected, the same Remove also appears on that card’s toolbar, so you can reach it from either end.
• Open the entity. Open on a card’s toolbar goes to that finished good’s, assembly BOM’s or material’s own detail page.

If a component change cannot be saved, the quantity dialog keeps your selection and quantity and shows the error. Correct the problem or retry from the same dialog. Closing it discards that draft.

Looking the other way: a material’s structure

Opened from a material, the canvas turns the graph around: the material is the root at the top, and under it sits every assembly BOM and finished good that consumes it, however deep the nesting. It is the fastest answer to “what breaks if this material runs out”.

This view is read-only. You can select a card to trace its connections, pan and zoom, but component editing controls and the card toolbar are not shown.

A graph is one direction or the other, never both — materials and bills cannot be roots of the same canvas at the same time.

Where to next

• Composition — the same BOM as a table, on the BOM’s own page.
• Subassemblies overview — why a nested bill exists at all, and how it is expanded at order time.