BLAUGI Blog of Autodesk User Group International

Civil 3D - Vault and Xrefs

Do Xrefs and Vault work together in Civil 3D? Keep reading… We believe we will see some improvements in this area for Civil 3D. As of right now, vanilla AutoCAD has the ability to Xref from the Vault. In other words, you will see within the Xref manager in vanilla AutoCAD the ability to attach a drawing from Vault. We can product the same end result in Civil 3D although it is a little different process currently.

I expect we will see this option in the Xref manager within Civil 3D soon. However, in Civil 3D, there is still a way to attach an Xref to several drawings to the extent that if that underlying Xref is changed, it will affect all references to that drawing throughout multiple files in Vault.

The way to make this work in Civil 3D right now is to Xref from the Working Folder. If we setup our working folder properly, and we have a drawing in this working folder that needs to be Xref’d into several drawings, all drawings in Vault that contain this Xref drawing will be updated when this drawing is changed.

When you want to Xref the BASE Linework 1 drawing file into other drawings, you will want to Xref it from the Working folder. More specifically, you would go to the Civil 3D Working Folder location, locate the project you are currently working in, and then find the BASE Linework 1 drawing file within that project and proceed to Xref it into as many drawings as you want. Then you can add or check-in those drawings to Vault. Even though I am seemingly adding this drawing several times to Vault, and the original one that was added to Vault was a copy from the original working folder location, Vault works out these relationships and it is intuitive enough to know that this file should not show up more than one time within Vault.

The “Linework” Drawing, in a Vault Project

The way we are using the Linework drawing in a Vault project is to bring together all of the Civil 3D objecs that reside in different files. At the base of the "Triangle" theory of a Vault project may exist several Civil 3D object drawings where each drawing contains a different Civil 3D object.

In the Linework drawing, we use data references through Vault to bring in the various C3D objects. The Linework drawing is then Externally Referenced into the sheet drawings. It is also fine to bypass the Linework drawing all together and data reference the C3D object drawings directly into the sheet files.

In the Linework drawing, you have the ability to control all the C3D objects simultaneously. For instance, if you have 20 alignments in the Linework drawing, and you want to apply a different look to all of those alignments simultaneously, you can create the appropriate style in another drawing and make sure the alignment style name is the same as the style applied to the 20 alignments in the other drawing. When you drag and drop the alignment style from the other drawing into the drawing with the 20 alignments, you will be prompted to overwrite as an option. If you choose the overwrite option, you will see all 20 alignments change simultaneously.

Upgrading Autodesk Data Management Server for Civil 3D 2007

You can load this utility to upgrade MSDE to Microsoft SQL 2005 Express Edition for Vault in Civil 3D 2007. This solution will double the capacity for the ADM server. This extends the size of the database from 2GB to 4GB.

Click on the below link to learn more about this upgrade and to load Microsoft SQL 2005 Express Edition.

http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS1057066

Share your Civil 3D Tips and Tricks with others...

Have you a favourite (or great time saving) Civil 3D Tip or Trick you would like to share with others ?

Yes! Then the Tips-n-Tricks forum (within the Civil 3D forums) is just the place for you.

VAULT with Sheet Set Manager; PART 3 of Vault Workflow

Can VAULT work with Sheet Set Manager (SSM)? Well........ not really! But if everything worked, there would be no reason for "work-arounds".

This is really Part 3 of the proposed workflow for Vault. I had this in my brain for awhile but did not find the time to blog it.

First, if you commit a Plan Set Drawing (Sheet File) to Vault, or multiple Plan Set drawings for a given project to Vault, you cannot leverage the Sheet Set Manager to check-in and check-out those files. As you probably know, once you commit a drawing to Vault, you need to utilize the check-in and check-out features as opposed to opening and closing the drawings. When you access drawings through SSM, you are opening and closing. If you try to create a Sheet Set from Plan Set Drawings that have been committed to Vault, it is nearly impossible. I haven't tried, but I really don't want to. As you may know, Vault is document management system for our engineering data, and the way it stores the drawing files and names the drawings makes it impossible to create a Sheet Set from those drawings committed to Vault.

The work-around... Don't commit your Plan Set drawings to Vault. When I first thought about this, I figured this would not be a solution because I assumed if you want to reference (through Data References) Civil 3D objects like Alignments and Surfaces into the Plan Set file, then the Plan Set drawings must be attached to the same project as the Alignments and Surfaces... I assumed incorrectly. As it turns out, you can access the data from any project into any project anytime you like. In fact, even if you have a drawing (in this case a Plan Set drawing) NOT attached to a project in Vault, meaning it is NOT committed to Vault at all, you can still access any data from any project. Some of us are skeptical if this was done purposefully or accidentally by Autodesk. Hopefully they don't "fix" this, which essentially breaks it!

Additionally, if you add the data references into the Plan Set files that are NOT committed to Vault, even though the design files that contain those Alignments, Profiles, and Surfaces are added to Vault, if changes are made to those design objects, you will be notified that they need to be synchronized through the prospector in Civil 3D within the Plan Set files. Did that make sense? In other words, they dynamics of objects between DWG files still work when you use the Data References. Now you can keep your Plan Set drawings independent of Vault in order to leverage the Great capabilities of Sheet Set Manager.

I hope this helps… please let me know if you have any questions or if I missed anything that comes to mind.