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The DGN Index Service is installed automatically with MicroStation based applications including Navigator, AECOsim Building Designer and PowerDraft.
It is a Windows service set by default to start manually.
It is designed to work with Project Explorer to maintain an index of the data within your projects.
When Project Explorer is used without DGN Indexer the cache that stores the lists of files and associated data in the project Explorer tree views have to be rebuilt for each MicroStation session, this is known as harvesting. For small projects this may not be intrusive but as projects build up the time taken by harvesting becomes significant.
Once started the DGN Index Service will take over from Project Explorer harvesting. It will index the file types chosen in the selected locations, MicroStation will use this index instead of harvesting for immediate display of Project Explorer tree views. The index is updated automatically as long as the service is running. A user can also initiate a rescan in the DgnIndexer Options dialog.
Files can be indexed locally and on network locations by remote instances of the DGN Index Service.
To see how this works let’s look at the local setup.
Open the DgnIndexer Options dialog:
The service startup is set to manual by default so it will not run until you change this.
However, first go to the Locations tab and tick the boxes for any locations that you would like to index:
Sub-folders will be included, selections can be made at any point in the folder trees.
Look at the File Types tab:
These are the defaults, add other files extensions as required. You can enter DGN and DWG related file extensions such as DGN, DGNLib, DWG, DXF, RDL, and CEL.
Go back to the Index Settings tab,
Change service startup from manual to Automatic.
Click Start.
The status will change to display the number of items indexed and the number currently being indexed.
Do not Start he DGN Index Service on client PCs.
On the Windows server that stores the network shares install:
Both MSI files can be extracted from the MicroStation installation download with a zip archive utility.
(Bentley DGN Reader for Windows 7 provides interactive preview functions in the Windows Explorer preview panel, Windows thumbnails and text search within DGN files.)
Once installed. modify and start the DGN Index Service settings as described above.
If you are using Project Configuration Files (PCF) to correctly connect your client PCs to their project data the PCF should have defined MS_DEF to point to the project data files. MS_DEF will direct MicroStation to look at the index on the correct server. The links in Project Explorer will then use the MS_DEF values to populate the project Explorer tree.
Data stored on non-windows shares, Linux/Samba servers for instance, are not currently supported.
You may want to alter the links provided by the delivered Link Set. More about Project Explorer in Mark Penn’s Project Explorer 101.
Project Explorer allows you to create links to the specified contents of the file types listed below:
Design, Drawing, and Sheet ModelsReferences Saved Views Drawing Titles Link set URL Key-in (supported by DGN file type only)