Configurations and Top-Down Design

Wout_Theelen

I created this part in a masterworkflow however I discovered that changing configurations isn't working for me.
When I update the parts for a new configuration the old parts update as well which I don't want.

The reviewer for my assembly will only be using view mode so will not be able to update the context of the
parts everytime and that would be a hassle anyways since other engineers would need to insert this assembly
and updating configurations everytime would be a hassle.
I have thought about using a completely seperate space allocation for each of
the assemblies but that seems like the wrong approach.

Any tips on how I could improve this document would be helpful.

EvanReese

This is tricky. Is your design heavily dependent on the in-context reference, or might you replace it with values from a Variable Studio? I find that in-context is good for quick stuff, but I usually shy away from it for final models because of things like this. It just doesn't feel as parametric as I'd like and requires you to remember to update it. I get why they did it the way they did since automatic updates would be even more dangerous though. If you're really stuck with the in-context reference, you may have painted yourself into a corner a bit.

eric_pesty

Can't quite tell what's going on from the images above...
In the lower one it almost seems like a mate issue with the parts that are floating (as if they are "grouped" from the part studio rather than mated in the assembly).
In general you don't want to rely on one context that changes with configurations (as you are finding out...). The way you could get around this would be to have a different context for each configuration of your "space allocation", but the downside is that you then need to configure you features to reference the correct context (rather than just the one so it's more work).
You would probably have been better off using a couple "derived in" layout sketches (eg top and side view) than an "allocation volume" context as those would be a lot easier to configure.

I agree contexts don't work that well when combined with configurations. Where they shine is in being able to have multiple contexts representing different positions of moving parts from an assembly.

Wout_Theelen

Thanks for the advice I ended up just creating all the parts again in a single part studio with configurations for them there that way I didn't need to reference any contexts the parts just directly reference the space allocation in the same part studio. So now the assembly can be made normally with the parts being mated directly to one another not to the space allocation.