Independent control of the same model

Your assembly may consist of many parts. And some of those parts may exist in that assembly as the same file (an instance). Now this scenario is totally acceptable as long as the parts which are the same file remain the same file in each clone produced automatically.

However, you may want those same files to behave individually, i.e. not have the same results for the rules put in place.
Take the model below for example. It is made up of various lengths of I-Beams. In the main each I-Beam used are the same length, but sometimes the I-Beam that falls at the end of the run needs to suit the remaining distance.

In this situation the master component must be given a unique name, something that sets it apart from its sisters. If this is done the same parameters can be captured, but different rules applied for their behaviour.
But what if the rules for this component can result in the same value as its sisters? You don't want a separate line item in your BOM for an identical part.

This can be overcome by giving some thought to your rule for the File Name of each part.
The list below represents a simplified view of the assembly structure: -

• Main Assembly
  
  • IBeam
    
  • IBeam End
    

The rule to calculate the IBeam length is = (OverallLength – EndDistance) /BeamQty
The rule to calculate the IBeam End length is = EndDistance
Now when OverallLength is 3000, EndDistance is 500 and BeamQty is 5 both of the above rules will equal 500.
And if these rules are also used for the File Name parameter of the two files it will result in the clones being produced, named IBeam 500 and IBeam End 500.
Not ideal for a bill of materials when these two components are the same.

What we want is for the IBeam End file to have the same name as the IBeam file, as you can see from the resulting clone file names, all that is different is the word End, used in the master file. To remove this DriveWorksXpress allows you to use the wildcard symbol. Using this at the start of your rule will remove the entire original name, all we need to cater for is to include the portion of the original name we want to keep. So the File Name rule for our IBeam End component will be: -

= "*" & "IBeam " & EndDistance

"*" will remove the original file name
& is used to join text, functions and named ranges together
"IBeam " is the file name description we want to add back into the file name. Note the space before the end quote, this spaces out the description from the number.
EndDistance is the calculation that results in the length of the part.

Hope you find this useful.