Working with end-item assemblies

The end-item assemblies enhance the system performance and help you focus by collapsing sub-assemblies. When you search for child components within an end-item assembly, the parent end-item is highlighted.

To improve the system performance and hide information that is not relevant to the user’s current task, one or more assemblies in a product structure can be set as end-item assemblies for that structure. When you expand a structure containing an end-item assembly, the nodes beyond the end-item assembly are not expanded.

Although you cannot set any occurrence as an end-item, you can view a structure containing end-items. When a structure containing an end-item is opened, the end-item is displayed as a single line in the assembly tree.

The End Item Assembly State column identifies the end-items in an assembly.

The 3D viewer displays the full assembly structure regardless of End Item Assembly State. To view the full structure of an end-item assembly in the tree, open the end-item as its own root node.

What happens when you search for a child component of an end-item?

To access the components of any subassembly, you expand the relevant subassembly.

As the assemblies marked as end-items cannot be expanded within the structure, their child components are not visible when the structure is expanded.

For example, if the steering system assembly is marked as an end-item in a vehicle structure, its components, namely, steering mech, pinion, and rack are not visible in the structure.

However, when you perform an in-context search for a child component of an end-item, the search results return the child components. When you select the child component of the end-item in the search results, the parent end-item subassembly is selected in the structure.

For example, when you select the PINION_DC2 child component from the search results, the parent STEERING SYS subassembly, which is an end-item, is selected in the structure.