illustrated parts list

At Mekon we have a tool for creating the IPL section of a CMM from a spreadsheet.

It creates a structured (SGML) document that is compliant with the ATA specification.

We developed this to help customers who get their parts data supplied as a spreadsheet and didn't want to recreate the whole thing in FrameMaker in our authoring plugin. The tool lets them create a mapping file that maps the spreadsheet data to the ATA markup, then they can process any spreadsheet of the same format and create a standalone SGML file that can then be opened with our ATA CMM authoring plugin for FrameMaker and the content edited and pasted into the main CMM.

Obviously, as with any conversion, the resulting file may not be perfect but it is a lot faster than creating by hand.

For more details see our website ..Mekon Eclipse Parts List Generators - Mekon Aerospace and Defence

What standard are you writing to? S1000D or iSpec?

It sounds as if you're asking how to do database publishing with FrameMaker; that is, extracting information from a database into Frame documents and then publishing.

If so, you might want to read Adobe's white paper called Database Publishing in FrameMaker 11. It is obviously a few releases behind, but it should give you a decent, high-level overview of how to use FrameMaker in this kind of process.