Very large asm & family table

I am working on creating an assembly file with well over 200 sub assemblies. This assembly file is only going to be used to drive a very large family table. Has anyone dealt with an assembly/family table of this magnitude. Im looking for a way to simplify this process. For one, it takes quite a bit of time to open, two, editing the family table is very intricate, and when an assemby is added, every instance in the table has to be updated, and redefined, as yes/no....Any ideas?

How many parts are in your Sub asm? <?:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />


Why family table why not simplified reps?


simplified rep can be made to auto add or reject any new parts or asm's.

Ok, here is what i am doing. See if you can follow this. I am creating one main assembly. This assembly is used only to create a family table. From the family table I create instances. The instances are used only to create drawings, and the only purpose of the assembly is to create a parametric BOM showing what is used in the particular assembly. Then multipal drawing models are added to the drawing and individual views of the parts are created. Originally I was creating asseblies for each drawing, but this got to be redundant, and a family table is a more accurate and efficient way of managing each instance.The files are used for NC layouts, where there is a drawing of each tool used on an operation. Let me know if this makes sense. ITs hard to explain....Sub assy consist of anywhere from 5-parts with no features,to 20-30 parts and20-30 features.

I have seen assemblies with very large family tables. Unfortunately, the reason I saw it was beacuse it did not work. The reason it failed was that it eventually grew to large to allow verification of each instance after a change. The computer ran out of RAM quite simply. This lead to even more problems in intralink (if you use it) as the info about structures will be incomplete if the family table is not verified.


In short: As long as you keep the size of the topassembly low enough to allow verification af all instances, you should be OK.


Note: I am only responding to the usage of large family tables, I do not try and see alternativesfor the handling of this particular model.