Enterprise Administration > Windchill ESI > Introduction to ERP Connector > Administration Tasks > Managing ERP Connector Distribution Targets > Defining Distribution Target Assignment Strategy > Top-Level Distribution Target Assignment
  
Top-Level Distribution Target Assignment
The top-level assignment strategy assumes that objects in a product structure inherit their target assignments from the top-level assembly in the product structure that the user has selected to publish. Only those targets of the top level assembly that are not already explicitly assigned to a child object will be inherited. Thus, if both the top level assembly and a child object have the same set of targets assigned to them, no inheritance of targets will occur from the parent assembly to the child.
For example, when we apply this assignment strategy to the multi-level product structure shown in the preceding figure, assembly 100-A is published with the following results:
Part 100-A is published to ERP Connector distribution target 1 because of explicit assignment
Part 300-A is published to distribution target 1 because of implicit assignment
Parts 200-A and 400-A are published to ERP Connector distribution target 1 and ERP Connector distribution target 2 because of explicit assignment
BOM 100-A is published to ERP Connector distribution target 1 with two components, part 200 and part 300
BOM 200-A is published to ERP Connector distribution target 1 and to ERP Connector distribution target 2 with one component, part 400
* 
Once a child object in a product structure is published to an implicitly assigned distribution target, the implicit assignment will be persisted and will appear in the UI as an explicit assignment for the object. Also, based on the organization that the object belongs to, an object can have default distribution target assignments upon triggering its publication.
An underlying assumption in the above example is that both the distribution targets 1 and 2 belong to the same ERP instance. However, in order for ESI services to consider any two ERP Connector targets to belong to the same ERP instance, some customization will be needed. For more information, refer to Administering Windchill ESI and ERP Connector.