Replace by unrelated component

[Chris3]

Starting with Wildfire 5 there was an enhancement made so that if a part is duplicated it could be replaced using the unrelated component and evaluation rules. The rules look for the same entity IDs and then auto-pair them.

Does anyone know of a way to make this happen with assemblies? For instance if I have a part that I now realize needs to be an assembly. I assemble the part into an assembly and how I want to use the evaluation rules to auto-pair the IDs for replacement.

If no one knows of a way to do this I will make it into an idea.

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[StephenW]

I would vote for the idea.

This may not apply directly but maybe it will, depends on the situation. If you added the part already to your top assembly and then discover your part needs to be in a sub-assembly, try the right click option, MOVE TO NEW SUBASSEMBLY. It creates a new sub-assembly and restructures the part in to that new sub assembly.

[Chris3]

I am aware of this option, unfortunately in my case I often have to do this in multiple assemblies so that doesn't help in those cases.

[gkoch]

I doubt the current matching algorithm or any other function in Creo can do this!

If you replace a part by a copy of the part, the feature IDs are the same in both parts, so there should not be much efforts to match them.

However, if you replace the part by an assembly where the part is a component within, the references are not actually in the new model (the assembly), but on a sublevel of this new model. And for the general case we would need to expect multiple components to be in this assembly, so it would not be clear from where to take the references.

So this would require a specific function that either checks the new assembly for the existance of the part that is to be replaced or - if the name has changed or if there are multiple instances of this part in the assembly - prompts the user for the one part in the new assembly, which should be used to replace the component references.

Not sure how often this will be used, but the votes on your idea will answer this over time.