About Component Families

You can find information about the naming of component families below.

Notes:
  • When working with parts, you can use design tables to create your component family.
  • You can use product tables when working with assembly families where the product structure changes depending on the element.

This page discusses:

See Also
Creating a Table
Creating a Generic Model
Managing Options
Managing Families

Component Family at a Glance

A component family enables you to generate and manage a set of physical parts or assemblies references. All parts and references are derived from a generic parametric definition and are altered for each element using a table of values.

Family Management
Two family types are provided:
  • Standard: Ensures that items are all generated with the same generic model iteration. Generic model maturity must be defined to a customizable target state to ensure that the model is not modifiable. A command is provided to automate the maturity change. Family evolution cannot use the current revision of the generic model. It must use a new revision of the generic model. This mode is adapted for standard components and families that rarely change.



  • Design: Provides an easier way to manage family evolution. Use this type if the generic model, including its table, is subject to regular changes such as new item definition or a change in geometry.

Note: Modify your catalogs when deleting or adding items.
On-demand generation
Component Family Definition provides a fully on-demand generation mechanism. The family items can be exposed in a classification tool before their geometry model has been generated. When a user needs the family item model, it is automatically generated. This allows not having to generate all models and to populate the database with useless models.
Models Ownership
The generation mechanism ensures that the generated models are owned by the family owner. The generated model maturity is optionally changed automatically during the generation process
Generic model changes impacts
You can choose to generate new revisions of previously generated items or to overwrite them after applying a new iteration or a new revision of the generic model on the family. If only the table was modified, this impact is limited to modified items.
More
Component Family Definition provides item test capabilities (without generating models), filtering capabilities to work on large families, query capabilities where items are used, and where the items are classified, as well as massive maturity change on generated models.

Component Families Concepts

Component Family Definition
A list of models (virtual or not) defined by simple parametric variations applied to a generic model. The models are said resolved when the generation operation (parametric modification and a save-as like operation) has already been done, virtual if not.
Family Item
A virtual or concrete model of a component family.
Family Definition
A generic model and a matrix of values that define at least the parametric variations of a component family and its variability in terms of BOM (instances of part or assembly family items). Each row of this matrix corresponds to a family item.
Generic Model
A part or an assembly used to generate a component family. It embeds all objects if required to handle its variability, according to the family definition.
Resolved Model
A part or on assembly derived from a generic model after the application of parametric modifications defined in a table.