Dissolve subassembly in the main assembly?

[ptc-726111]

Hello,

Does Pro-E (Wildfire 4.0) have a command to dissolve a subassembly? The components within the previous subassembly would be moved to the main assembly after the subassembly is dissolved. This feature exists in SolidWorks, and I thought it may be present in Pro-E as well under a different name.

I did try the restructure command, but it would not allow some components to be moved from the subassembly to the main assembly. I think this is due to specific welds (Pro/Welding) that are referencing components (surface-to-surface) within this subassembly. I wonder if there is a straight-forward solution that I am overlooking?

Chris

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[ptc-726111]

I received some replies on suggested techniques for dissolving a subassembly in Pro-E WF 4.0:

• I can't recall in Wildfire 4.0, but in Wildfire/Creo I think I remember being able to drag components in the model tree out of the assembly and into the main assembly. Just expand the subasm, select the component and drag it out of the subassembly and into the main assembly. I know I've done something similar to that before.

• Restructure is the correct tool and it does need a little work, and you are probably not overlooking anything. However, one thing that Pro will not let you do, (don't ask me why) is move the first component out of an assembly. That is probably what is giving you your grief. You can trick it by putting some dummy component in the subassembly before the one you want. Move all of the other subassembly components up to the main assembly and then just delete the sub assembly and its dummy component.
  
  Dissolve sounds like it works quite a bit better, but alas, it does not exist in Pro to the best of my knowledge.

• I'm on WF 2, so I don't have an answer for you - but I wanted to warn you about the restructure command - you might want to revert the assembly back to before you tried that. My experience with the restructure command is that it leaves circular references in its wake; we’ve outlawed the practice in our group.

Replacing the first component with a "dummy" component seems to work the best for my situation, but does not work in all situations. I cannot drag the component off of a subassembly to the next level up so maybe that is new in Creo? Circular references do not seem to be a problem as I was prompted by Pro-E to refine / break exterior references during the restructure process.

Lastly, as far as I know Pro-E (WF 4.0 & earlier) does not have a dissolve function (SolidWorks) for dissolving subassemblies, but it would be a useful function for restructuring a BOM in a large assembly.

Chris