Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

RE: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Stephan Searles — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 18:10:54 GMT

Pretty much...

RE: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

@B, Carl Broyles — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 15:34:00 GMT

It should be a TR - 7 years 12,464 views, 26 replies, no solution?

Any file can have multiple attribute "sheets". This concept has been in ProjectWise since forever. But we have never had a way to utilize the data. Where is the logic in that?

The logic of the request is simple – the binding of the data stays the same. Sheet models have an integer attribute that can corresponds to a specific PW Attribute sheet.

A value of 0 equals one PW Attribute sheet per file. A value of 1 – infinity equals the PW Attribute sheet attached to each sheet model. Model properties are check and title block integration updates the values accordingly.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Stephen Herrick — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:30:13 GMT

Kevin,

I have implimented such a workflow, of using fields to reference other sheet/models information. That works great with updating at plot time and using the renumber function, i ended up writing a small mvba that would update the tag valuses from the fields then utilized the titleblock integration to update the attributes. I did make it both ways so if the user makes the change in the attribute, when the file is opened the field is updated.

Have you noticed in MicroStation Project Explorer that the HARVESTING seems to take longer than what ProjectWise takes to check the file. I have never actually verified this but SURELY the Harvesting is taking advantage of DFT.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Dean Lyon — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:48:45 GMT

Ah. I see that when you say field you mean a reference $FIELD$ who's value is shown when the file is rendered/viewed/plotted. Not what I thought of as a field. I am not sure what mechanisim in Microstation or AutoCAD would be used to make that entity/element show the correct value without customizations that would have to travel with the drawing if you gave the native file to a vendor, supplier or such.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Kevin van Haaren — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:30:36 GMT

The biggest problems we wanted solved (and we've gone over this with Bentley)

* we use sheet titles and page references in notes on sheets other than the sheet with that title (i.e. "See detail # on sheet TITLE, page #)

* we frequently insert new sheets causing the need to renumber sheets frequently.

The first issue really doesn't work with tags because tags replace entire text node and trying to use a tag with text around it just doesn't work. Fields solves this problem by only replacing the field value

Ideally to use fields to reference a sheet/page number of another sheet, one could bring up Project Explorer, select the sheet the field would reference and select the sheet title/page number and insert a field into a text note.

Sheet numbering should be done at rendition (i.e. print but renditions are becoming more than paper these days) time with on the fly numbers applied as generated.

To be honest, i'm not sure ProjectWise is the appropriate place to store all these values. ProjectWise should be aware of them though.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Jason Harkless — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:31:58 GMT

Kevin,

Ironically, your last suggestion is precisely what I am suggesting in my post yesterday (ProjectWise working with Project Explorer)- the PW team seriously needs to get on the ball with this. The fact that we do not have a solution that allows us to make references to other sheets that will dynamically update when we manage the other sheet's attributes (i.e., Project Explorer Links) via a management solution (i.e. ProjectWise) is honestly, absurd. Then add to that that there is no easy way to actually automatically keep a dynamic index sheet listing all of the individual sheets (i.e. Axiom's Title Block Manager)- we are just managing the same data in way too many places.

I'm not personally experienced to verify this, but I have been told Autodesk does this- might be time to consider our alternatives...

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Dean Lyon — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:30:58 GMT

Kevin, are you saying that you need a dedicated order of fields, rather than named? Do you think a benificial mapping would be for Enter Data Fields / Text Nodes (autoCAD) and with a list of fields to map. Therefore, updating from PW to file and file to PW would map the first node/field to the first attribute listed untill all nodes are exhausted, going to each sequental sheet while unedited nodes exist, using the same list of attributes for each sheet. Well, that is the way it was done in a program I had to maintain before tags came along in Microstation. Should Bentley have an option that emulates this?

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Kevin van Haaren — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:14:31 GMT

We have several offices that have built in house solutions as well. One uses a spreadsheet and some vba, the other uses an Access database and MDL. Both of these offices use their existing solutions with ProjectWise. It does involve checking out all the sheet files to make bulk updates, but they had to make sure they were the only ones in the files without projectwise so it's a bit of a wash.

Due to the limitations of how text is handled with tags, the current implementation of title blocks would not work for us, even if they supported multiple sheets/models per file. They just aren't flexible enough. Instead something more along the lines of how MicroStation fields work is needed.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Dean Lyon — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:15:05 GMT

Now you have my curiosity piqued. Can you tell us how the customer diferentiated between the inserts of blocks that have the same name?

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

shenry — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:36:22 GMT

" no plans to correct this (huge lack in functionality) with The next release what I am informed..."

OUCH! .....

Did a ProjectWise presentation to a prospective client recently and everything was going really well until I covered this topic. The client had a spreadsheet solution (had it for years) that addressed this specific issue and it would be an understatement to say that client's enthusiasm evaporated at that point.

Have not heard from them since, so I guess no implementation role for me and no ProjectWise Software sale for Bentley.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Dean Lyon — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:45:00 GMT

I get what you are trying to do now. You want 1 to N inserts of the same title block or cell and have ProjectWise fill in each separate instance with from the multiple sheets on the document, since you can have multiple sheets on a document. I wonder how they are going to tie the insert to the sheet that is supposed to fill it.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Mikkel Bennedbaek — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:15:44 GMT

DeanLyon, the problem is that PW in practise can only handle one model in one file when it comes to title block intergration. Multible sheets has lived in MicroStation (and ACAD) for more than a decade, so a litle strange PW can not handle it i think. And no.. no plans to correct this (huge lack in functionality) with The next release what I am informed...

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Mikkel Bennedbaek — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:01:44 GMT

Scott,I am not sure you can add your name to the CR. It is not how it works. Please create a ST an pray that Bentley will upgrade it to a CR. ;).

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

shenry — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:52:20 GMT

Dean,

The issue discussed below relates to having a DGN or DWG file containing multiple titleblocks that need to be populated with different information. This is an issue for both MicroStation and AutoCAD products.

My take on this topic is that, Ideally, Individual ProjectWise Attribute Sheets need to be 'linked' to an identified instance of a Tag Set(or Attribute Block). This would support MicroStation's existing ability to generate multiple cross sections etc.

Obviously if it was always a fixed number of titleblocks, per DGN, several Attribute Exchange definitions could be created i.e. TB1, TB2, TB3..... etc. This however, amongst other issues, would result in redundancy of attributes needed to populate the tags that contain information specific to that instance of the titleblock. Hence it is not a suitable long term solution to the issue.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Dean Lyon — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:58:25 GMT

title block integration works for both Microstation and AutoCAD. All you have to do is setup the definitions in the Administrator. You can bind like definitions to the same fields if you wish. So I would assume that mulitple sheets working for one would work for the other as well.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Mikkel Bennedbaek — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 10:21:19 GMT

DGN projects I will say, as we are working in MicroStation with DGN-files (in DGN workmode).

However, the client wants a final package in DWG, so in the end we convert the files.

Because of that, Bentley apparently catogorize the project as a DWG project.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Bob Hanson — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:07:21 GMT

We also would like to be able to have title block integration for multiple sheets in one file - both MicroStation and AutoCAD.

I did a search for the CR but came up empty. How do I locate the CR and add us to the list.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Scott Soper — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:22:29 GMT

Mikkel, do you mean DGN projects or are you working in Autocad?

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Mikkel Bennedbaek — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 16:53:53 GMT

CR 319918: User wants PW to work on DWG projects where several sheets in one file are used

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Scott Soper — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:24:40 GMT

If you give us the CR number we can add our names to it.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Mikkel Bennedbaek — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 15:22:59 GMT

Hi again! At least great to know that I am far from alone struggling with this issue :)

Just to keep you all informed...

I made a CR on this some time ago, but last week a had a remote session with Jutin Jussal from Bentley where I descriped the issue/wish in details supported by example file / illustration.

When he gets back to me I will remember to keep you guys all informed, but meanwhile I recommend that you also submit CR's, as I am not sure that Bentley realy understands how what great improvement that support for multible sheets in ProjectWise would be... :)

You will here from me soon...

Mikkel

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Mikkel Bennedbaek — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:43:13 GMT

We are often having 20 sheets or more in each plotfile. As there is about 30 or more tags in each title block (depending on the number og revision lines which varies), I would need to find space for over 600 titleblock text fields in the attribute dialog. Even if I used fontsize 6px or smaller, that would not make room enough... :)

Besides, (it is not very importent, but...) if you are using the same TagSet on several sheets in same file, I think only on of them will update the database from the titleblock when using the update key-in... ?!

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Scott Soper — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:10:48 GMT

At WSDOT, we have used multiple sheet files since we began with Intergraph. We currently have the ability to automatically place up to 40 sheets in a file.

When we began using ProjectWise in 2005 we realized that in order to integrate attributes we would need to move to single sheet per file. This was not meet with enthusiasm by our users.

Now, due to other factors, we are looking at single sheet files again, but I still think it would be advantageous if we had the option to apply attribute integration to multiple sheet files.

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

David Keam — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:19:24 GMT

I believe this is a significant oversight by Bentley. Multiple models have been part of the dgn file format since V8 and that's a long time. InRoads has been generating multiple cross-section sheets in a single dgn for even longer. For cross-sections and occasionally long-sections we use multiple attribute sheets for single dgn to keep our ProjectWise records correct but title block integration is a nightmare. I think ProjectWise should allow association with a model in a dgn and InRoads should put each sheet in a set of cross-sections into a different model. Maybe 2 CRs?

Re: Unable to handle multiple sheet drawings .. ?!

Scott Turner — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:38:16 GMT

Ditto that here. I've also run this past Bentley and would get quite a bit of benefit out of this. One other requirement: If the individual paper space tabs where then saved off to their own files (prior to delivery), PW should also know to create the corresponding attributes and potentially audit trail entries as well.