I ran into a problem today with creating configurations in a pipe routing system. Within my top level assembly I have 4 separate routes. I had no trouble creating configurations at the top level isolationg the individual routes (for later detailing in the drawing). However, late in the design process, my supervisor suggested "breaking up" one of the more complex routes into 3 separate sections to make things easier for the welders.
The first thing I thought to do was create configurations at the top level assembly and hide components of the route su-bassembly I didn't want. This appeared to work at first until I was finished and checked back through my configurations and realized that it very much did not work.
The next thing I tried was to open up the route sub-assembly and create the required configurations at the sub-assembly level. From there I created configurations at the top level assembly selecting the corresponding sub-assembly configurations. This was even more of a disaster.
Lastly, I ended up using display states to achieve the desired result. I first created the needed display states at the route sub-assembly level, then created the corresponding display states at the top level assembly, and THEN created configurations at the top level assembly which were linked to these display states (I think I may have added an un-needed step in there, but by this point I was so desparate to get this project finished that I decided to be EXTRA thorough so as not to screw something up again - as using display states alone seemed to mess up my BOM).
A quick Google search yielded just one discussion on this forum from 2009 which stated that (at the time) SW didn't support this type of functionality (link below). So I'm not sure if that's still the case here with SW 2012, or if it is another issue perhaps with my assembly or something.