HY-8, HEC-RAS, EC-HMS and ProjectWise

Question

Our drainage engineers export .hy8 documents residing in PW, work on the files and then import. News to me, HY-8 is a culvert drainage analysis tool made available by FHWA. 
 Even though we have an HY-8 Application in PW, and one can open the documents directly, there is an issue saving and writing data apparently. 
 I'm sure this is old news, but if there were any insights to be shared for any known issues or incompatibilities I would sure appreciate it. 
 Jeff

Mark Shamoun · Answer

Hi Jeff, 
 
 Have you tried using this with Projectwise Drive. If you enable auto checkout and disable Document Wizard for file creation for PW Drive, it should work well.

Dave Cumming · Answer

Hi Jeff, 
 I'm not familiar with HY-8, but I recently worked with a user who needed to integrate their HEC-RAS workflow with ProjectWise, and we did use ProjectWise Drive to make that work. Something that you'll want to consider is whether or not the HY-8 application generates temporary or backup files that it stores in the PW Drive synchronized folders ... files that you don't want uploaded back to ProjectWise Web or ProjectWise Design Integration. 
 HEC-RAS generates temporary files and gives them a .tmp.hdf file extension. This caused conflicts because file.tmp.hdf would be automatically checked out at the time of creation and would not automatically check itself back in. Compare this to the way AutoCAD works... AutoCAD will generate files with extensions like .dwl , .dwl2 , or .bak . But ProjectWise Drive has already been programmed to exclude those formats from the synchronization, so they will not be checked out or ever show up in PWDI or in the Web interface. In the case of the .bak files, users will still see them in their own local PW Drive folders (on the machine where they were created). The .dwl and .dwl2 files are automatically deleted. In both of those cases, AutoCAD works as it would in any other Windows folder. 
 
 There are a handful of other types of exclusions, and as more users turn to PW Drive to integrate new application-based workflows with their ProjectWise DI ecosystem, we will need to add to that list. 
 For the HEC-RAS application to function as desired, we needed to add .tmp.hdf to the list of exclusions when generated by HEC-RAS. I am not sure if that has been built into the product yet. If it has not been, my understanding is that it will be in an upcoming update. If you end up running into an obstacle like this as you test this solution with your users, file a ServiceNow Case, include the term "PW Drive Exclusion Request" and include a link to this post in order to expedite the resolution process.