Assembly Design > Configurable Products > Creating Configurable Products > About Configurable Products
  
About Configurable Products
With a configurable product you can create product families based on the same generic design, with different configurations. A configurable product is a type of assembly that contains standard components shared between all models and unique components specific to each model. As in any assembly, a configurable product can contain a skeleton model as the first component in the assembly. A skeleton model contains publish geometry features, to define structure, location, and motion in the assembly.
A configurable product is identified by in the Model Tree. A configurable module contains multiple component variations called module variants. A configurable module is identified by in the Model Tree.
Creating Configurable Products
You can create a new configurable product as an assembly subtype, or you can save an existing assembly as a configurable product. A configurable product can be a top-level assembly, or a subassembly in the context of a configurable product or module.
Assigning Options and Choices
After you create the configurable product, you can assign options and choices to different configurable modules, module variants, and regular components in the configurable product. The list of options and selection of choices in the list is used in the Variant Builder dialog box to select components from different modules that meet specific criteria.
Creating Design Variations
Using a configurable product you can maintain a general product structure with multiple design variations. Each design variation, called a variant, is a standalone assembly. Therefore, at the end of the process, you have a separate assembly for each variant. In the Variant Builder dialog box you can create and save variant specifications of the product, preview potential product variants, and generate new variant assemblies. A variant specification defines the choice of components in the variant. The variant specification can be created new in the assembly, or they can be reused from an existing variant specification stored locally or in Windchill.