Jason, it is grey at this point in time as you have an assembly open in the background that has triggered Large Assembly Mode.
Check the "Assemblies" option down the left side to see what threshold you have (default is 500). The checkbox which is grey for you supersedes this threshold and opens all sub parts lightweight no matter how big.
The solution is to close any open files, go back to this option and you should find it won't be greyed out any more.
I'm no expert but I do know first hand that it can cause problems when exporting to other file types such as .smg
Doesn't Composer just open the assy graphics only? What difference would Lightweight vs Resolved have?
Steve C
Thats what I was thinking, but after struggling for two days to open a large assembly in composer the only solution was to resolve the lightweight and turn off large assembly mode. My thought is when you have lightweight your assembly has "fewer" components. (I dont know the equations behind this but if you do a performance evaluation it will tell you there are fewer components). I guess in order to convert from .sldprt to .smg the components cannot be compressed in any way. I tried both exporting from SWX to . smg which would cause a crash, as well as opening in composer, which resulted in failure to translate file.
Once again, Im not expert, I dont know why it is this way, its just what worked for me.
Jake
Looking into the Knowledge Base it seems it is key to not use lightweight to ensure the metadata/custom properties get translated properly. In lightweight mode sometimes these don't come through into Composer and your BOMs/Balloons can be missing information. In addition if you use the "update" feature to bring through model changes to update your views, Lightweight must be disabled for the behind the scenes translation to be successful. There are a few Knowledge base articles such as S-058444 that describe this.
Steve Calvert wrote:
Lightweight will allow your assemblies to open faster, why disable it?
Steve C
My reason would be, Once it opens lightweight I still have to resolve it to work with it. and Large Design Mode is even more of a pain to work with.
Working on the model, no lightweight.
Review use the review mode for assemblies.
Go 4 or 5 sub assemblies deep in a plant layout and "shudder". Lightweight has been the cause of many headaches over the years in the different places I have worked. I have never seen it work very well on large assemblies. Maybe it works on smaller ones, I never see the need for it on an assembly with only 40- 50 parts anyways. Speeds up the load time I guess.
File > Open, Mode: Resolved. Open.
Same is available in Recent Documents UI by the click to expand double arrow in the lower right corner of the icon square.