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Support for internal revision tracking


Christiaan

Question

BIM standard ISO 19650 has this great concept of revision management for internal work in progress changes, helping you manage your work-in-progress and avoid losing information during its development. This system is intended for any kind of 'information container' (file), be it a model file, a drawing, programme, whatever, but you can also treat VW Sheets as information containers, even if you don't export them to files.

 

These WIP revisions are denominated with a two-number suffix. So you start off with P1.01, make a change P1.02, make another change P1.03 and so on. Then when you're ready to issue the changes to the wider team it gets shared as revision P1. Nobody except your internal team can see the work-in-progress revisions.

 

What would be nice in Vectorworks, for Sheets, is the ability to record these internal work in progress revisions in the Title Block Border revisions, but to be able to control visibility so that they're only seen by the internal team. So some sort of parallel list of WIP revisions, that can be switched on or off while viewing the Sheet (on by default) and also at a higher level when using the Publish or Export commands (off by default and requiring explicit switching on on a one-off basis each time you Publish or Export, if you want them to be visible).

 

Harder to get my head around, but also potentially very useful if executed well, would be some way to manually record WIP revision notes when saving a copy of a whole VW file. If there are Sheets involved this could include an automated summary of WIP changes to Sheets too (so a P1.01 revision of a VW file might include a bunch of different revisions to Sheets, P1.05, P2.03, P1.02 etc.). To work well though I think this would need to involve some sort of a new high level menu command (File > Save as a Work in Progress)  for explicitly saving a file as an ISO 19650-compliant WIP file. Rather than simply duplicating a file manually in your file system. This command could then prompt the adding of WIP revision meta data.

 

There's also the Project Sharing History tab, although to be honest I've never used it. But seems to me this could be used for recording file level internal revisions with a bit of discipline. Does any do this? It would certainly be more useful if it verbosely tracked changes to Sheet revisions.

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I assume you that you mean the revision number change after making a change in the drawing only happens after saving a changed drawing, closing it and then re-opening to make a change would only then increase the change number. I.e. as long as the drawing file remains open any further modifications do not change the number after saving until it gets closed and re-opened.

 

Otherwise a 2 digit number will not be sufficient, a  3- or 4-digit number might then be more appropriate.

 

What I normally do is create a copy in a new folder everytime a new update revision to the main drawing is being made and whenever major changes are being made to the main or sub-drawings so that I will always have the previous version to go back to. Though this also comes from having to deal with lots of changes from day to day or sometimes even during the day and then after a bunch of changes it gets decided to revert back to some previous intermediate version and then start anew with updating based on that version.

 

Let's say it can get messy revision wise 🙂  and an autonumbering system will have trouble with this unless you can manually change the sub revision number to keep a continuous numbering for the revision changes albeit with the consequence that visual/progress linearity will be broken.

 

It could work nicely once you are past the conceptual development stage when most of the issues/things have been fleshed out. So yes it would be useful to have, not just for BIM.

Edited by Art V
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1 hour ago, Art V said:

I assume you that you mean the revision number change after making a change in the drawing only happens after saving a changed drawing, closing it and then re-opening to make a change would only then increase the change number. I.e. as long as the drawing file remains open any further modifications do not change the number after saving until it gets closed and re-opened.

 

No, it would require the manual entry method. Complying with ISO 19650 already requires manual entry of revision numbers because they consist of a letter and a number (see attached). But we actually stopped using auto-incrementing revisions many years ago because we were using our own but similar system.

 

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Otherwise a 2 digit number will not be sufficient, a  3- or 4-digit number might then be more appropriate.

 

In practice it's only the changes you want to keep a record of and not lose, so two digits (99 changes) is beyond plenty. 

 

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What I normally do is create a copy in a new folder everytime a new update revision to the main drawing is being made and whenever major changes are being made to the main or sub-drawings so that I will always have the previous version to go back to.

 

Yes, that's essentially what the WIP revision system in ISO 19650 is all about. It just formalises that into a standard way of doing it.

 

 

 

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Edited by Christiaan
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