Notes Database

[Tom K]

I just discovered the notes database a few weeks ago (whew hoo). Now whenever I create a new note I add it to the database and place it on my drawing as a callout. What a great timesaver when you are repeating the same information over and over in different viewports.

Here are my questions. If the notes database exists on my computer and we have five people working in the office on the same project:

- how do we share the same notes database file?

-how would we keep separate databases in sync.?

(several of our people work on laptops which they use to work on at home).

[Guest]

There are a couple different strategies for this, but here's where I would start:

* Put the database on the server somewhere, and get everybody to access it from there. That way, you only have one copy that you have to worry about (and back up regularly).

* When people are working offline, they can simply type the text that they want. Then, when they get back to the office, they can use the "Reconcile Notes" command to locate all of the manually entered notes, and either replace them with notes from the database, or add those notes to the database.

This works OK if you're not working offline very much. But if you're off the network a lot, you'll want to have a local copy of the database. This creates versioning issues. Here's how to handle this:

* Regularly copy the network database to the laptop, and use the local copy when working offline.

* When you get back to the office, delete the local database and then run the "Reconcile Notes" command. The first thing that it will ask you is to locate the missing database. Satisfy it by pointing it to the network database. It will then search for differences between notes in the drawing file and notes in the database, and show you a list of all differences that need to be reconciled.

Charles

[Tom K]

Thanks for the help Charles.