I need to draw connectors of three main styles:

One being the two halves of a male/female pair separated like below.

In this case, the two halves are shown on the same page, but most often one of the halves will be on a different page.

Another style is two connector halves shown mated together like below.

In both these cases I need the BOM to show two components, the male side and the female side (the associate shield blocks and actual pins/sockets are another story). Also in both these cases I want continuity from wire end to end. So in the top example the wire originating at pin 8 on the left most connector to pin 1 on connector P918. From there it will go to pin 1 on J918A and finally to pin C on terminal block T900-3 (optionally it could have gone to J918B). So the from/to list would just show pin 8 to pin C.

In the bottom example the wire from pin 30 on the left most connector goes to pin 1 on P958, through pin 1 on J958 to its destination of a breaker on the power wiring sheet.

In each case, the BOM should list the parts for both the male and female components.

For the second example it looks like you have to do some serious kludging. in this case, how does one bring in a symbol which looks like the two mated halves but with distinct part associations and pins/sockets for each side?

Or, do I always have to bring in two separate symbols (with associated parts) and butt them up close together so they are almost connected? This appears to be the case.

It looks like you have to insert both halves of the connector in order for them to go into the BOM correctly. Then butt them up together and use "wipeouts" and other workarounds to make it look right.

There is a built in symbol which looks correct and has a connection point on each side of the pins, however you can't associate two parts to it, I.e. the male and female components. Wrong, you can assign the two parts to it. But, it's not hyperhyper passing or dynamic.  Would have to create a custom symbol for each use.

Now, in order to see continuity between mating pins:

• there can be pin/socket continuity but the pins must be of a "hyper hyper passing" type AND have a wire drawn between them ( you can "wipeout" the wires so they don’t show in the drawing).
• Why have them as "hyper hyper" if I still have to draw a wire between them? Only hyper hyper passing will pass the WIRE ID (along with equipotential).
• And now I have extra wires in my list! This sounds like a lot of extra work! Should be able to filter out reference wires by their linetype in the BOM.
• I read in a post that it was not necessary to draw a wire between the two hyper hyper pins, this is true but has its on caveats.

To this end, here is my struggle with these types of connectors.

My first effort was to make two connector halves that would have continuity between the male and female contacts without having a wire physically drawn between them as seemed to be indicated by this post.  http://my.solidworks.com/reader/forumthreads/72979/shield-terminations

First I made copies of my typically used PIN symbols, a male and female pin, gave them a new name to indicate their status, then changed the "information transmission" attribute of their connections to hyper hyper passing.

Then I made a copy of my dynamic connector configuration and renamed it to indicate its status. Edited the circuits and replaced the original disconnectable pins with my new hyperhyper pins.

After this I added two new connectors to the drawing, a male/female pair with one pin each.

Although the wires were terminated  correctly there was no continuity according to the cabling order. This is supposed to work much like "origin-destination" arrows on broken wires. I looked at the symbol for an outgoing destination arrow and saw that it's circuit type is "black box" and that the circuit orientation was outgoing. So I made new versions of my connectors with blackbox circuits and orientation (out for the male pins, in for the female pins). This still didn’t work. Spent quite awhile changing things to no avail. Then a statement in the forum post caught my eye. "The symbols are associated to the same component". So for an experiment I replaced one connector/pin with a pin from the same connector.

Now this actually worked! I had a complete circuit even though the two pins were separated. Of course this was NO good because both pins were on the same connector, I.e. jumpering. Tried to get slick and create a blank component and put two connectors inside of it. That didn’t work either. SWE still sees the two opposing pins as parts of subcomponents.

I had pretty much given up on the idea that I could have to mating connectors, physically separated, but still completing circuits (without drawing a wire between them). For the heck of it I drew a stub wire off each of the connectors and applied origin-destination arrows. This DID complete the circuit and all I had was small reference wires which I could hide if I want.

This gets me pretty close to what I want. The only bad thing about it is the "reference" wire is never shown complete, which is one of our standards. To do that I would need to copy one of the connectors to the other page and show the complete connection there. For normal "disconnectable" pins, you can copy/paste them (seems like I get duplicate connections on reports though), but for pins that are hyperhyper that creates a new component. It looks like doing "ref" wires to to disconnects is out.

With a little more experimenting I also found that I did not need to modify connector parts to make the circuit type "black box" (like a origin-destination arrow), regular male-female pins work too. Also, the circuits in the pin symbols do not need to be oriented as incoming or outgoing (like a origin-destination arrow), regular in/out works fine.

Well, I thought I had this workable but the joy was soon blasted.

As soon as I add another pin to the connectors (the intermediary disconnects, P1 & P2) the cabling order tells me that ALL the pins/wires are on the same circuit. Like they were jumpered together. Apparently having more than one hyperhyper circuit on the same component will pass info between themselves and not just what they are physically wired to. Bummer, another days work wasted.

Between this fail, inability to add terminal blocks we commonly use, inability to name wires according to our industry standard, too many workarounds, too many kludges, I really don’t think I could recommend this software for aviation use.