In a configurable product, the overloaded product structure contains multiple designs to support a range of product options. To filter the structure of your product you can create options with different choices. Each option can have several possible choices that are relevant to specific variations of the product. Frequently multiple options and choices can be associated with multiple components to further filter product variants and bring them together with specific logic. Components, modules, and module variants can be associated with a choice.

Use the Assign Choices dialog box to define options, associate components to the option choices, and assign choices. The owner of the options and choices can be a top-level or lower-level configurable product or a configurable module. After you define options and choices, you select the components to associate with them. The defined settings are available in the same session in the Variant Builder dialog box. Click the Related Link to see an example of setting choices, associating components, and assigning choices.

The first step to filtering your product structure is to populate the dialog box with options and choices. You can create new options, or you can use options already defined in the assembly or from Windchill. When you are working in a linked session with Windchill, the options and choices associated with the configurable product display by default.

After defining the options and choices to use in the configurable product you must associate module variants, components, and at times modules to the choices. You can set options and choices for module variants when you create the module and include module variants. Select the components, modules, or module variants you want to associate to specific choices. You can close the Assign Choices dialog box and open it again to associate different components to the same options but with different choices.

There are two types of assignments, include assignments and exclude assignments. Multiple choices of the same option must have the same assignment type to a component. When you finish selecting components, the icons to include and exclude become active. Choices assigned previously to components are still valid and appear in the option list. You can delete previous choices assigned to components when you click the associated icon. All previous assignments of this choice to any selected components is removed. When you create new assignments, they are assigned to all components selected.

When you assign components to choices you do so in the context of the owner. These assignments are saved with the configurable item. When you choose a component with previous assignments from a different owner, the assignments are displayed in the Other assigned choices list.