Cascading referenced viewports

[Mathieu Hefti]

Hi there,

We are working on a quite huge project and need several files to be referenced all together to be able to work as "team work" (manual old-style Project Sharing...). The structure of our files is:

AAA Building part A (employee alpha works on it)

BBB Building part B (employee beta works on it)

CCC Building part C (employee gamma works on it)

GEN General building file (nobody working on it, just to match all together)

All the Sheet layers are created in and managed from the GEN file. We have the same Classes definition in all the 4 files and we set the GEN file's viewports on AAA, BBB and CCC file to "Use current document's class visibilities".

This configuration allows us to set each Sheet layer to have different class visibilities depending on what we want to print. The problem is with the Class override not working on Sheet layers.

Let's say we have a "Concrete walls" class, with green pen and blue fill in all files. I would like to override this setting in only one Sheet layer of the GEN file. If I do so, it's not working. But if I set the class override in the Design layer viewport in the GEN file, it works, but all Sheet layers are affected, which is not the goal.

How should I do to be able to set the graphic attributes of each Sheet layer separately without to affect the whole file?

Any help would be quite welcome!

[Guest Wes Gardner]

Hi Mathieu,

You may want to take a look at these two documents that outline the use of Workgroup Referencing.

Wes

Edited February 18, 2016 by Wes Gardner

[Mathieu Hefti]

Dear Wes,

Thank you for these great tutorials! I don't know where they come from, but it should be integrated into basic VW help!

Thank you again.

[PVA - Admin]

Wes and many other Industry specialists in his department are working hard to add more workflow-oriented info to our documentation with more industry specific input than a team with mainly a technology background like mine could provide. The end goal is for all of it to be accessible in (and integrated more fully into) Vectorworks Help.

Currently the Help functions like a technical manual or a dictionary, requiring you to know the name of the tool or command you're looking for in order to look it up. We want to add a layer of "What are you attempting to do?" that can then suggest workflows and other more thoughtful documentation like this.

[Mathieu Hefti]

Dear Wes,

I've implemented the workflow suggested in the documents you sent to me. It's quite powerful and it increased a lot the speed of file opening. I nevertheless experience a strange behavior of VW regarding the shared project's library:

I've created a file named VWLibrary.vwx containing hatches, line types, wall styles, symbols, etc. and referenced its content in each model and production files. That way we should be able to manage all the project's ressources in a single file and insure that everyone is working with the same ressources.

I nevertheless get a strange result of this general referencing across all files: every time I update a referenced file or open a file, the referencing of VWLibrary.vwx is "lost" and all ressources are referenced from another model file instead of the common library... I mean that when I pass the mouse over a symbol in the ressource browser, I get the message: Referenced in modelA.vwx instead of VWLibrary.vwx.

I also experienced that, if I modify a symbol into VWLibrary.vwx, it doesn't update automatically in the other model files. Is there any possibility to update it automatically, like a shared library should do? (otherwise I get conflicts between shared and own library).

Thanks for your answer.

[Mathieu Hefti]

Any update or fix?