For my current project at work I am taking Solidworks Components, editing them in an external program, exporting as STEP, and reimporting into Solidworks. I open the new STEP file and save as a SLDASM file. Depending on the component, I may use the 'replace' command and relink the mates. Or, I may delete the original component and manually add in and mate the modified component. This all works fine.

However, I am having problems with many of these new parts 'disappearing' or losing their location references upon reopening of the main assemblies. The broken references are typically of sub-components/parts and references the original step file (?) for some reason, even though the components were re-saved into native Solidworks ASM and PRT. Sometimes I can right-click the missing components in the feature tree and say 'unsupress' and it will find the files again and all is good. However, alot of the time it can't find the part it's looking for (even though I haven't moved any files or changed folder names etc) and I have to delete and re-import all over again, losing my exploded views etc...

Why is this happening? Is it something with my workflow, or a glitch?

I am running 2019 sp2

TO SUMMARIZE WORKFLOW

SLDASM > External Program > STP files > Open and Save as SLDASM > Replace / Reimport into main assembly

Additional Info: For some reason, some of the STEP files I converted to SLDASM also save all the components inside the STEP file as SLDPRT part files for the assembly. Some of the STEP files I convert don't do this though... it doesn't seem to matter if I have the 'also save referenced components' box checked on save or not, as the SLDPRT files always show up later, not with the initial save for some reason... pretty confused about what is going on and how Solidworks handles the original STEP file when saving as a SLDASM...

Message was edited by: Colton Campbell, SEE ADDITIONAL INFO AT BOTTOM