Interchange assemblies in Windchill

[jflorczak]

Use case: This case is strictly related to CAD management in Windchill, involving interchange assemblies composed of template models and reusable parts. To maintain compatibility with Windchill, template models are copied and renamed to ensure unique filenames specific to each design, while standard models must remain unchanged, retaining their original names. There are houndreds of projects being launched that generates project specific interchange assemblies. 

Renaming models that are part of interchange assemblies requires one of the following approaches:

1. Retain the existing interchange assembly, extending it with project-specific models to maintain interchangeability.

2. Create a new interchange assembly with a different name, while keeping a reference to the “reusable” one. However, this option would unfortunately require changes to the “reusable” models, which is highly unlikely as they need know to which interchange assembly. 

[avillanueva]

Can you illustrate with a pictoral example? Are you looking to have it replace the copies of the template model from project to project?

[jflorczak]

So every project need to allow to replace specific models, especially those which belong to interchange assemblies. After making a copy of CAD data for specific project each model need to get unique name, except models which represent standard parts. In theory standard parts should only get updated in very rare cases. But, because they belong to interchange assemblies whenever there is an interchange assembly created, specifically for the given project to make it fully functional all standard parts that belong to it, would need to get na update as well.