This is an essential guide if you are moving or renaming SolidWorks files which are children to higher level assemblies.

How Assemblies Work

In this document the scope is limited to the file linking of assemblies and not the rebuild process (that could be a whole other document).

An assembly file by itself provides enough information to show the entire assembly without bringing in all of the separate parts, though this is limited. This is the reason you can open assemblies in large-scale design review without importing any parts (this is also a reason assembly files are so big! and load quickly in large-scale mode)

An assembly file also remembers all the links to file locations of parts used in the assembly, suppressed or not. the links can be reviewed before opening a file.

• before opening the file click on references
  
• Here you can see all the references the assembly uses when importing parts and assemblies. It depends solely on the file name and file path
• I believe (could be wrong) that these file paths are relative, if the assembly is in a higher level directory. That is why you can move an entire sub-system around if it is in a hierarchical order (good practice).

Note: this does not only apply to assemblies, this can also apply to drawings and parts given the part is dependent on another file.

Moving Files

From this you can see that if we move a file to another location the assembly looking for the now moved file will get confused and throw an error. so we need to re-link the file after moving it. The same goes for renaming.

Thankfully SolidWorks added some new functionality for this through the Context Menu in Windows. These functions allow users to Open a file with more options, Rename files, Replace files and Move files (never tried Pack and Go: let me know how it goes). The way it works is that it searches for all the references of the file in the directory you set. Then when you move or rename the file it will automatically update the file references in the found files which reference the recently changed file, saving you the hassle of manually doing that. It is also useful for determine if parts are being used in any assemblies, by simply checking if that part is referenced anywhere, if it isn't then it is probably safe to archive.

1. Right click the SolidWorks file you want to rename/move
   
   
   
2. Before clicking Move or Rename you must set the file location first. This is the directory where SolidWorks will search for references
3. Set the appropriate search directories, turning off the selected tick box will speed up the search time
   
   
   
4. Then right click again and choose whether to move or rename, the instructions in the pop-up window should be clear enough.