Has anyone discovered/invented an easy way to get components in subfolders to be automatically found when opening an assembly that references them? My situation is migrating from using PDM WORKGROUP, to SOLIDWORKS PDM STANDARD, having a sophisticated folder system for library components, mirroring the project structure we had built in the WORKGROUP vault. The process of building this folder structure in the new SOLIDWORKS PDM STANDARD vault was relatively painless as it turned out, but opening assemblies in the new vault for the first time and using the search tool to find each component not in the same folder as the assembly, is prohibitively cumbersome.
I can think of a couple of solutions.
1) You could continue with Prasad Bhonsule's idea of also adding all the sub folders to the list of referenced components. If the list is long, I'd look into writing the folders directly into the registry [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SolidWorks\Solidworks 2016\ExtReferences\Document Folders] because adding them one at a time would be painful. ...if you go this route you will notice a performance hit when opening files, so over time you may want to start removing paths from the list. (You could build the list pretty quickly with a little batch program)
2) In PDM Standard, you can use the "Update References" tool. It is a swell tool for updating/fixing broken references. It has a search function built in so it can find the files rather than you manually navigating to them.
3) If you aren't too far down this path, 3DVision's ExportWorkgroup tool https://www.3dvision.com/images//pdf/ExportWorkgroup_DataSheet.pdf can export the current versions of your Workgroup files and keep your references from breaking. You would have to "start over" but if you have a ton of broken references...