Managing assemblies

The following activities are associated with managing assemblies:

• For guidelines on how to improve performance when working with large assemblies see Working with large assemblies efficiently. This topic provides information about how to improve system performance and use display configurations to hide, unload, and inactivate assembly components (see Display Configurations command for additional information). Performance can be improved without hiding parts and subassemblies by inactivating them. When you inactivate components with the Inactivate command in the PathFinder, they remain displayed but use less physical memory (see PathFinder in assemblies and Inactivate parts in an assembly).

• After being enabled in QY CAD Options - Assemble tab, the Limited Update and Limited Save commands can be used to control update and save operations while working in Solid Edge assembly. The Limited Update command confines updates to only those documents that have been locally modified in the current design session. If other documents have been modified by someone else, those changes can be viewed and updated by using the Component Tracker (see Component Tracker command for additional information).

  The Limited Save command changes the behavior of the Save operation when working in the assembly environment. Selecting the Limited Save command confines the save operation to only those documents that the current user has opened and has write access permissions. Limited Save acts on documents in the current assembly structure. Processing is from the active level down. Part copies that reside in parent level assemblies are not updated with Limited Save (see Limited Update command and Limited Save command for additional information).

  These operations can have performance improvements when working in large assemblies.

• When working with a large assembly, it can be useful to work with a simplified version of a complex part. For example, a part that contains numerous rounds, chamfers, and holes will process more slowly than a part where these features have been removed. The commands in the Simplify Model environment are used to reduce the complexity of a part so that it processes more quickly when used in an assembly. The ultimate goal of part simplification is to reduce the total number of surfaces that make up the part (see Simplifying parts for additional information).

• The primary tool used for managing the display status of assembly components is the PathFinder tab. Use the features of the PathFinder to create display configurations of an assembly, that are used to quickly recall the show/hide status of the components in an assembly. It can also be useful to define a set of components in an assembly based on the volume of space the parts occupy. The Create Zone command (right-click on a component in PathFinder to open the pop-up menu→More→Create Zone) to create a Zone. This is used to define a rectangular volume of space based on one or more selected assembly components. Then use that named zone to select, display, or hide all the assembly components that are contained within the boundary of the zone (see Create Zone command for additional information).

  Performance improvement can be improved by reducing the number of parts that are displayed in a large assembly.

• QY CAD provides functionality to create reports that provide information about the components that make up an assembly. Different types of reports can be generated such as Bill of Materials, Exploded Bill of Materials, Summary of Atomic Parts, or Parts List (see Assembly reports for more information).

• Use the systems library functionality in QY CAD to define the group of parts, features, and assembly relationships so they can be easily reused. The parts, features, and relationships for a systems library member are stored in a user-defined assembly document. A systems library document can consist of Complete subassembly documents, Part documents, Features that are associative children of one of the part documents (see Working with Systems Libraries in assemblies for more information).

• As previously stated, showing only a selected number of components in a large assembly can improve performance. To that end the flexible use of display configurations where named views of specific parts, subassemblies, or assembly functionality can provide useful and performance improved subsets of a large or complex assembly (see Using display configurations for additional information).