Adding extended or compressed springs

[BrunoA]

How would I add a spring or spring clip to an assembly such that it constrained to the appropriate surfaces and deflected (extended or compressed) as it would be in real life?

 

[tmox]

there is a tutorial on SDotson.com for that very thing. the coil needs to be adaptive and if i'm not mistaken one end needs to be constrained to a plane in the main assembly and the other end to a component surface.