Configurable assemblies and drawing packages

[blandb]

Question for all you programming experts, or ones that may doing something similar to this already.

If you have an assembly that you are configuring, lets just say a balcony rail set. You will have an assembly that will cover the front of the balcony, and a rail on each side. Those lengths can vary, the quantity of panels and styles can vary across the front, may need to have a left hand and a right hand and a center section based on the length of the balcony. So a user swaps out, adds, removes etc. to get the desired result. Now, its time for the drawings of that configured balcony. This is where I get a little confused. Do you already have drawings created for all the different balcony assemblies that could be used, and then just scan the assembly for the sub-assemblies used and then just print those drawings? Or, do you automatically grab what is used in the assembly and code it to where it places the front views and projected views?  I am just looking for some seasoned advice on these configured assemblies.

In previous places I have worked, if we had a configurable assembly, it was just replacing standard piece parts or sub-assemblies of standard items, so it was easy, because our assembly drawing would just call out the standard items, and if I needed those, then I would just print them off as well. 

I am trying to keep that same workflow, but didnt know the best way to handle this.

thanks for all your input in advance.

[A.Acheson]

Not really working on a similar workflow to you. I have tried to reuse tube and pipe drawings by copying assemblies and reference the drawings but there is still a lot of messing  especially because diameters change and annotations get detached. But I guess if you have sub assemblies not changing they would get there own drawing and the general arrangement would get the whole assembly. 

• I have noticed that if you can keep your model intact and just change lengths sizes most of the annotations will stay attached. However if you change patterns, or swap parts the annotations will come detached.
  
  
• You could set up ilogic to place all your views and speed up text annotation  and Qtys with iproperties from your bom and occurrence names. However annotations are where the time is spent so reuse of drawings without tearing your hair out is the goal. I have seen some code for reattaching annotations, deleting detached annotations.  
• If you are up for a challenge and you have parts that are incredibly consistent you could get the annotations to snap to the parts faces by using names faces. This will work well as long as all faces are visible in the view. How named faces work with tube and pipe or frame generator I don’t know. You can only name faces in parts. 
  
  
• Can you post a sample collection of drawings even if simple or explain the workflow in a little more detail with some pictures and see what comes up.