Effects of Assembly Structure Editing

When you dissolve a subassembly, or reorganize the components at any level, the mates and any features that reference the selected components are affected. Therefore, decisions about hierarchical groupings should be made early in development of a complex assembly, in order to minimize the effects on these items.

Mates move to the Mates folder of the lowest common parent. For example, assume that there is a mate between P1 and P2, in the Mates folder of the nested subassembly S3.

  • If you move P1 up one level (into S1), the mate moves to the Mates folder of S1, the lowest common parent on the same branch.
  • If you move P1 into S2 (a different branch), the mate moves to the Mates folder of the top-level assembly A, because A is the only common parent.
  • If you dissolve S3, the mate moves to the Mates folder of subassembly S1.
Component patterns have specific limitations.
  • If you move the seed component of a pattern into a different assembly, the pattern feature and all the instances generated by the pattern are deleted.
  • You cannot move individual instances generated by the pattern.
Assembly feature cuts and holes might be deleted. Assembly feature cuts and holes are deleted when you move subassemblies up a level in the FeatureManager design tree.

When you form and dissolve subassemblies, assembly feature cuts and holes are not deleted.
Equations may not be solved. This is because, in many cases, the instance number suffix <n> of the components changes when you reorganize or dissolve an assembly. This is done automatically, to prevent conflicts with existing components in the destination assembly.
The reorganized component is removed from any explode steps where it appears.  
Routing subassemblies are subject to some special rules. See Editing a Route Subassembly for more information.