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All assemblies must have the propereties defined in the Assembly interface. These are the ability to add, remove and list the items in the assembly and a way of getting hold of templates for what the assembly might contain.
Most compound assemblies of items extend the BaseAssembly object. It contains a list of the items in the assembly, and, optionally can specify a _CMLINK(drawing, CompoundDrawing, CompoundDrawing) to replace the default graphical representation of the assembly.
Anything that can be connected to other items within an _CMLINK(assembly, Assembly, Assembly) is an AssemblyItem. This guarantees certain properties, including having a position within the asembly, and being able to inform other components what types of inputs and outputs it accepts.
Most sockets in the workbench extend the BaseSocket class. The idea behind sockets (in the sense of fa thing you might plug a chip into, not a network socket) is that they define the connections of an object, but not its contents. That is, in building a circuit board, you wire in actual sockets, but the chips themselves come from elsewhere. It works the same way here: a model can include sockets which receive connections from other parts of the model, but the processing unit that belongs in the socket is defined elsewhere. Many sockets can refer to the same processing unit without any duplication of data. There are two ways that sockets differ from the physical analogy, however: their possible connections may change depending what is plugged into them; and they may represent populations instead of just single units. more to come....
A box for grouping components into _CMLINK(assembly, BaseAssembly, compound assemblies). Once grouped, the compound can be used in _CMLINK(assembly, BaseSocket, soekets) of the appropriate type.