Bentley Map - GSA - Defining user workspaces.

Once you have created a Geospatial project, you now have the opportunity to add user workspaces. User workspaces are used in the GSA ( Geospatial Administrator) to :

• Segregate your data into logic boundaries ( like departments).
• Define different MicroStation\Bentley Map workspaces, interfaces or applications.
• A placeholder for some of the feature meta-data.

Sometime while you are setting up the Geospatial project, you will need to make decisions about the overall user workspace design workspaces. This probably should be performed early in the project definition, since some of the feature meta-data decisions are dependent upon the number of user workspaces that are available. Let's look at a example of a geospatial project with one user workspace defined.

From the above picture, we can see some similarities between the "All Users" Node children and the "Workspace (designer)" Node. There are a few branches that the two have in common, namely:

• Features
• Operation
• Methods
• Domains
• Criteria

These common nodes between the workspaces highlights a concept called "scope" in the meta data. Every feature, operation, method, domain, or criteria can be defined local to a workspace. Basically the rules are:

1. The items in the All Users  group are visible to all the user workspaces.
2. Distinct items in a particular workspace are visible to only that user workspace and not other ( not even the all users workspace).

This  is advantageous in a couple of ways. First , it allows us to separate features into different workspaces, within the same Geospatial project. We can then manage a whole organization's features, from different departments , in one project. Second, it allows us to create the placement meta-data in the workspace of choice ( we will see how to do that in a later blog.).

If we look at the files in the folders, that are created when we export the workspaces and meta-data, we can see how this is carried out.

First let's look at a screen shot of the GSA with features defined in different workspaces.

In this configuration we have the Pipe Test feature in the test workspace and the Pipe feature in the All Users workspace. We also have Operations and Methods nodes for each in the respective workspaces.

So, What will this produce to the user ? If you are in the test workspace what do you see as available features ? What about the All Users workspace ? Let's see.

Designer Workspace ( only the all users feature).

Test Workspace ( Test and All Users features).

The next blog will cover the ways we can define features, criteria, domains, operations and methods in the different workspaces.