I recently fought this same battle. Unfortunately there is no way to keep existing hole features happy if the old hole files are no longer available. Any redefinition of an existing hole feature will instead default to the first thread type and screw size available.
It would be great if PTC could add some method to hide obsolete hole files from the user interface while still allowing existing hole features to access them. The embedded option doesn't work because it would need to have been enabled all along, but that causes other issues if you ever need to make any changes since the embedded hole files will ignore changes to the non-embedded versions.
I ended up doing three things:
- Remove all obsolete hole files from the end user's Creo configuration. They only get the new hole files.
- Leave all obsolete hole files in the CAD worker's Creo configuration (along with the new hole files.) That way nothing ever gets messed up during publishing if a hole feature is still depending on the old hole tables.
- Built a SmartAssembly program that interrogates each hole feature to determine what it used to be, figure out what the replacement should be, and then update each hole feature to use the new hole table. This also allows us to do some things that can't currently done with the out-of-the-box hole tables. Things like setting counterbore depths based on actual screw lengths and setting thread depths based on a company standard.
