Ok, thanks. Since it's a relatively short time duration and a simple assembly, I decided to do it frame by frame in the following manner: I made a family table of the part with the flexible dimensions as the vaying parameter. I then assembled every instance of the family table to the same coordinate system. Now by changing the component visibility during animation, I simulated the component flexing.
It was still time consuming to assemble every instance to the same coordinate system. How would I write a mapkey that automatically aligns coordinate systems of a new component to a component already in the assembly? Every method I tried, the mapkey paused for user input.
A family tabled part may not be the way to go for the reasons you mentioned.
You could try and make the relation to change your part inside your assembly and just hit regenerate each time. That should save you from having to assemble each instance every time.
