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Best practice for setting up a project with multiple rooms/locations


elc

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Hello all,

since I am starting with the documentation of a project with multiple rooms, I wanted to ask, if there are any best practice tips on how to set up my file(s)?

 

Lets say I have a building with 40 rooms for "end users" and 5 rooms with technical equipment spread out over the entire building.

Usually (e.g. in AutoCAD) I could have all rooms in one model space and just create layout pages showing the individual rooms. And blocks for all devices being used.

How would I do that in ConnectCAD?

a. have one Schematic design layer with all room setups?

b. have separate schematic design layers for the buildings floors?

c. have seperate design layers for each individual room?

 

Or would I use separate files, e.g. one for each floor of the building?

 

 

Thanks for any hints (direct or via a resource link)

Best,

George

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  • 3 months later...

hi @Mark Aceto,

that's a good questions, that can't be put into two sentences. what I've learned so far though, is that it greatly depends on what your final outcome has to look like. In my case I need A3 sheets for each room. And I don't seperate systems (audio, video, control, IT,... and so on). Everything is in the same drawing. Also I am not using Spotlight. I am really only here for ConnectCAD. At least for now. But the file is huge (40MB) already and tools are starting to get slow. So I am not sure, if I really want to explore all the 2D and 3D options VW gives us. 😉

But in a nutshell: started out with one layer per room and am (in a second project) trying the one design layer per floor approach due to technical and workflow issues.

 

A bit more details if you are interested:

Since I haven't heard back on the forum, I just started with one design layer per room. While layers/rooms with a lot of equipment have to be spread out so they can be printed on seperate layout sheets. (might require arrow connections for in-room equipment). Main reason for this was that I could assign the room name to the layer and reference the layer in my said arrow connections (e.g. "--> Layer/RoomName - Device Name - Port Name"). But the workflow of moving arrow connections between layers is not as fluent as one might hope. And I had issues with inter-layer cabling (lost connections with no solution yet). Which is a pain when you try to move large amounts of devices with a box select. But it seems to happen mostly(?) to EXT devices. I don't know. I just try to select the devices without the arrow connections. But I am getting off topic. 😉

 

Because of the above unsure situation and the fact that a few tools only work on the same layer I wanted to try to keep the amount of layers for the schematics to a minimum and only have one layer per floor. Let's see how that goes. 🙂

 

 

Again a pretty long post, sorry. But it is still just a fraction of the issues questions I would still have. 😄

Still in the trying-to-wrap-my-head-around-VW phase though. Hope this helps anyway.

 

Would be intersting what you decided on and what output you have to generate regarding paper size and system separation?

(We were also thinking about just going with A0 for larger rooms instead of multiple sheets and arrow connections)

 

 

Best,

George

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@elcthanks for the quick reply! I ran into a lot of the same considerations and caveats (as my sheet layer from 11x17 to 24x36 to 36x48), so I think I'll keep everything on the same Schematic design layer, and then use viewport cropping to break out to multiple sheet layers. I also will have to layer in multiple depts / systems, so that will get interesting... 

 

@Conrad Preendoes it make sense to use rooms as floors in a 2-story building? In other words, nest multiple rooms inside of a (floor) room? Screenshot below for clarification. Or should the room organization be "flattened" like:

  • Floor 1 - Room A
  • Floor 1 - Room B
  • Floor 1 - Room C
  • Floor 2 - Room A
  • Floor 2 - Room B
  • Floor 2 - Room C

(Apologies if this is answered in the Help documentation.)

 

1441394144_ScreenShot2022-05-27at12_22_23AM.thumb.png.f556f20e5905b145df90d16b9c597a82.png

 

Edited by Mark Aceto
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Hi @Mark Aceto

depending on the amount of devices this sounds like a good approach.

 

Another questions: is there a function for floors? Or are you just talking about the design layers that you use as floors?

In your image you are using the room function on the schematic layer, right? As far as I know, this does not work with the room data attached to devices (schematic layer) only with equipment (in the rack elevation layer)? Or how did you set this up?

 

 

Best,

George

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  • 6 months later...

I was wondering if anyone had figured out a good way to deal with multiple systems in a project yet.

It is problematic when extracting device schedules or doing rack elevations, unless the same device in each room is given a different name.

I feel like I must be missing a simple solution, as it's an issue that affects nearly every project!

 

The two solutions I have are to either split into a separate file per system, or to rename all devices in each system (leaving the display tag the same). Both of these are quite cumbersome.

 

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Alistair

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On 12/5/2022 at 10:51 AM, AlistairM said:

I was wondering if anyone had figured out a good way to deal with multiple systems in a project yet.

It is problematic when extracting device schedules or doing rack elevations, unless the same device in each room is given a different name.

I feel like I must be missing a simple solution, as it's an issue that affects nearly every project!

 

The two solutions I have are to either split into a separate file per system, or to rename all devices in each system (leaving the display tag the same). Both of these are quite cumbersome.

 

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Alistair

 

Since ConnectCad requires all devices to have unique names, in instances where I have the same system duplicated in multiple rooms, I tend to add a prefix to the device name "Room1_KVM1" "Room2_KVM2" etc. 

As you mention you can keep your display tags the same to keep the names on the drawing from getting too long but I usually never do this as it gets to be too much work managing different device names and display tags across hundreds of devices.

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On 5/28/2022 at 6:20 AM, elc said:

Hi @Mark Aceto

depending on the amount of devices this sounds like a good approach.

 

Another questions: is there a function for floors? Or are you just talking about the design layers that you use as floors?

In your image you are using the room function on the schematic layer, right? As far as I know, this does not work with the room data attached to devices (schematic layer) only with equipment (in the rack elevation layer)? Or how did you set this up?

 

 

Best,

George

 

I don't think there is any built in functionality for floors but I have also found myself wanting to define more than just a room name as some times my projects span multiple buildings/rooms/floors.

In the interim I just name the room object "Building 1 - Room A"

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