Part III: Working with Assemblies
Parts and subassemblies
Parts and subassemblies are shown with their familiar icons in the design tree. You can reorder and
group them in folders, which is covered in the next section.Parts are sometimes shown with a feather, which indicates a lightweight part, and assemblies can
have an icon that indicates a flexible subassembly.
Special icons also exist for hidden and suppressed components.
Folders
You can create folders to organize and group both parts and mates. I discuss this technique in
detail later in this chapter.Mates
The Mates area remains a constant, single folder, but you can organize it by reordering the mates
and grouping them into folders. Each mate is shown with a symbol corresponding to the type of
mate it is, but the mate folder is shown as a pair of paperclips.Assembly features
In manufacturing, once parts are assembled, secondary machining operations are sometimes
applied to them to ensure that holes line up properly, or for other purposes. For example, assembly
features can be cut extrudes, cut revolves, or hole features. These features appear only in the
assembly, not in the individual parts.You should not confuse assembly features with in-context features. In-context features are created
when you are editing a part in the assembly with a reference between parts, but the sketch and
feature definition are in the part itself.Component patterns and mirror components
Component patterns can pattern either parts or assemblies by creating either a pattern defined in
the assembly, or a pattern that follows a pattern feature created in a part. The pattern is listed as
a feature in the assembly FeatureManager, and all the instance parts appear indented from the
pattern feature in the design tree. You can hide or suppress each instance, change its configuration,
and in most ways control it as if it were a regular part in the design tree.Because the options for locally defined patterns are comparatively limited, users generally like to
use part feature patterns to drive the component patterns when possible.