Flexible Assembly Feature in mBOM

The following diagram illustrates the structure of an assembly containing the Base, Connector, and flexible Hose parts. These parts are assembled to build the Design Sub-Assy part on the upstream structure. Each occurrence of the Hose and Connector parts is assembled to build the subassemblies on the downstream structure. These subassemblies and the Base part assemble to create the Top Assy part. The equivalent occurrence links map the occurrence of a part on the upstream side with that on the downstream side.

Design Sub-Assy stores the information related to the assembly features on the upstream side. This is denoted as

in the diagram. The Hose part, which is not bent in the default representation, is represented as bent in the context of Design Sub-Assy. However, Design Sub-Assy does not have an equivalent part on the downstream side. As the Top Assy part on the upstream and the downstream sides is a common equivalent context for both the structures, the information related to the flexible feature is stored in the Top Assy part on the downstream side. Therefore, whenever you try to update a flexible part, Top Assy gets checked out.

The flexible representation is displayed only when the edrload.dynamicstructure.representationasfeaturesource property is set to false while creating mBom. When set to false, data is populated in the downstream nodes, which is used to display flexible representation in the downstream structure.

There are known limitations in the flexible assembly feature in Windchill 12.0.1.0 release. The feature will be improved in a future release.

• The Process Plan Browser does not support manufacturing context for the flexible assembly feature.

• The feature does not support image association of parts.

• There might be some issues with the position of a child part, where its absolute position is calculated by multiplying its relative position with the position of its parent parts in the hierarchy above the part that holds the flexible assembly feature.

• Reference operated on the part shows correct representation only when the part is not allocated in the Occurrence mode in Process Plan Browser.

• When there is no change in geometry for the flexible assembly feature on the upstream side, reconciliation assistance may still detect a change in flexible representation. You can choose to resolve this discrepancy by comparing visualization on the upstream and downstream sides.

• When updating the downstream structure using the Generate Downstream Structure, Synchronize Structure Associativity, New Alternate BOM, or Duplicate action, updates detected in the flexible representation of parts are not maintained in the downstream structure.