Hello all,

Wondering if anyone had good standard practices when deciding on modeling a product line in Solidworks with products that are similar to each other:

How do you make the decision on a product series whether it will be a new assembly or have everything controlled through configurations/design table/driveworks/(your preferred method of quickly switching features/hardware)?

Do you make your decision simply on level of complexity and time to set everything up?

I'm currently working on a project where there are several sizes of the same product - went with the Design Table route - but when I got into placing hardware, I'm finding there are 100+ rules to set up based on size alone because hole patterns and hardware counts change so much between sizes and customers' selected options.

I'm thinking that it would have been much quicker to set up each size as a separate assembly file and not fill out 100+ design table cells which check for product dimensions and customer options.

On the down side, it would make more assembly files to manage (such as in a case of a universal bolt being changed to a longer one).

Would love feedback on this from some Solidworks veterans.

Thanks in advance.