Virtual Components in the land of PDM

In the land of SolidWorks Assemblies exists a funny creature called the “Virtual Component”.  Virtual components are typically used in top-down design when you need to create a new part in the context of an existing assembly. During the conceptual design process, when you frequently experiment with and make changes to the assembly structure and components, using virtual components has several advantages over the bottom-up design method as explained by the SolidWorks help system online: 

• You can rename these virtual components in the FeatureManager design tree, avoiding the need to open, save as a copy, and use the Replace Components command.
• You can make one instance of a virtual component independent of other instances in a single step.
• The folder where you store the assembly is not cluttered with unused part and assembly files resulting from iterations of component designs.

Some of the thinks that you have to watch out for are the inability to create a drawing of the virtual component.   To make a drawing of a virtual component, you must save it as an external file.  To save it as external you simply right mouse click on the file and save as External Part and it will ask for a file name and folder location.  Simple as that.

Now to really throw a wrench in the works, how do PDM systems track these virtual items?  Workgroup PDM will certainly let you add an assembly with a Virtual Part, but it has no means for really tracking it beyond the where used report.   There is a setting to turn this on in the User Options, but selecting this option has significant performance impact. and since a virtual part is ususally only used relative to one design, this setting may have a low return on investment.

Enterprise PDM actually handles these quite nicely and if a virtual component is being used, it is shown in the check in dialog box in reports as well as the BOM tab, which is really where you want it displayed.  Below is a quick video demonstrating the differences between Workgroup PDM and Enterprise PDM concerning virtual parts.