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The purpose of this document is to guide you through the deployment process of Bentley Substation CONNECT Edition. The deployment process involves the following steps:
Please refer to the article How to download the Bentley Substation software.
An administrator should install the software on one machine that they can use to initially configure the software and establish a shared corporate workspace further explained in step 4 below.
For instructions on installing Bentley Substation CONNECT Edition you can refer to the online Bentley Substation Help > QuickInstall Guide.
If you want to create a software deployment image in order to facilitate the installation of the software across your organization then refer to the Substation Help > Deployment Guide topic for detailed steps on how to create this.
To share projects among multiple users you will need to have SQL Server running on a network server. See the application’s readme file for SQL Server requirements.
To create a new CONNECT project database, you can refer to the article, “Creating and Updating the Project Database.”
To migrate your existing V8i projects to CONNECT Edition you can refer to the article, "Migrating Bentley Substation from V8i to CONNECT Edition."
The installer delivers two separate example workspaces for each electrical standard named, “Substation ANSI-IEEE Example” and "Substation IEC Example" which contains the standard symbol catalogs, parts database, page formats, templates, etc.
Important! Bentley reserves the right to modify the Example workspaces on new releases of the software. You must create and deploy a new corporate workspace that includes your custom content and templates rather than modifying the existing Example workspaces.
To create a new WorkSpace follow these steps:
5. Enter a name for your workspace such as “MyCompany” and point the Root Folder path to the “MyCompany” workspace.
By default, the dataset resides in the following folder within your WorkSpace:
…\MyCompany\Standards\Substation
The dataset is organized into the following subfolders found in the before mentioned folder:
You may delete any default content that you do not need from the dataset. For instance, you may have no need for the Sample Projects or specific catalogs.
If you have custom content from V8i that you would like to use such as catalogs, report templates, and other files you can copy them over to the CONNECT WorkSpace to the appropriate folder.
The following sections will explain in more detail how to add your custom content.
To ensure that the software loads your custom catalogs you must follow this twostep process:
Catalog Paths can be specified in one of two ways:
Directly editing a configuration file
Set the configuration variable named, “ELEC_CATALOG_PATH” in a configuration file to point to the folder that contains your catalogs. All catalogs found in this folder will be loaded by the software. If you wish to load catalogs from different locations you can specify multiple paths delineated by a semicolon “;” when setting the value for the ELEC_CATALOG_PATH variable as shown below:
ELEC_CATALOG_PATH = $(_USTN_WORKSPACESTANDARDS)$(_USTN_APPLICATION)/Catalogs/;//MyNetwork/Catalogs/MySecondCatalog/
The two recommended places to specify your catalog paths are as follows:
Refer to the article Configuration Files for a greater understanding of the configuration files in the application.
Using the application’s interface
To configure your own parts database, you must follow this process:
Create a parts database mapping configuration
To create a parts database mapping configuration you must use the New/Modify project dialog. To access the dialog, you must first select a WorkSet in the Project Manager and then follow these steps:
The parts database mapping is stored in this file:
MyCompany \Standards \Substation\ PartsDBMappings.xml
If you need to change the location of this file you can modify the value of the ELEC_PARTS_DB_MAPPING_PATH variable in the Configuration Variables dialog or by directly editing the WorkSpace configuration file (MyCompany \Standards \Substation\ Substation.cfg).
Set the ELEC_ACTIVEPARTSDATABASE variable
You must now tell the software to load the parts database mapping configuration that you just defined in the first step. This is done by setting the ELEC_ACTIVEPARTSDATABASE variable to the name of the parts database mapping configuration. If you want to ensure that the software uses this parts database for all WorkSets, that do not specify their own parts database, you must set this variable in the WorkSpace configuration file.
This can be done in one of two ways:
To make changes to the default System Option settings in the software you can follow this procedure:
To make changes to the default Project Option settings in the software you can follow this procedure:
ELEC_PROJECT_OPTION_PROFILE = $(_USTN_WORKSPACESTANDARDS)$(_USTN_APPLICATION)/Config/Options/MyProjectOptions.xml
To make changes to the default User Option settings in the software you can follow this procedure:
The Profiles folder (\MyCompany\Standards\Substation\Config\Profiles) contains many sub folders for the various types of profiles or formats that are commonly used in the software as shown below:
Copy your custom profiles to the appropriate folder above.
If you want to change the default location of the profiles, the variable ELEC_PRJ_PROFILE_DIR can be modified in the Configuration Variables dialog or by directly editing the configuration file (MyCompany \Standards \Substation\ Substation.cfg).
Copy your custom Multi_Language_UI.mdb to this folder:
\MyCompany\Standards\Substation\Databases
If you want to change the default location of the page formats, the variable ELEC_LANGUAGE_DB_PATH can be modified in the Configuration Variables dialog or by directly editing the configuration file (MyCompany \Standards \Substation\ Substation.cfg).
Copy your custom page formats to this folder:
\MyCompany\Standards\Substation\PageFormat
If you want to change the default location of the page formats, the variable ELEC_PAGE_FORMAT_DIR can be modified in the Configuration Variables dialog or by directly editing the configuration file (MyCompany \Standards \Substation\ Substation.cfg).
The Templates folder (\MyCompany\Standards\Substation\Templates) contains many sub folders for the various types of templates that are commonly used in the software as shown below:
You can individually change the default location of the template folders using the Configuration Variables dialog or by directly editing the configuration file (MyCompany \Standards \Substation\ Substation.cfg) for each of the following variables:
In the CONNECT Edition, WorkSets can be used to apply configuration settings that override the WorkSpace. If you have a need to frequently change settings on a project basis you can define separate WorkSets for each project. In such cases, it can be advantageous to take advantage of template WorkSets to drive the creation of a new WorkSet. By doing so you can apply project specific settings to any new project that you create. Here are some typical uses for a template WorkSet:
You can add Template WorkSets to your workspace by following the instructions in the article Working with Template WorkSets.
Once you have defined your own corporate workspace you will want to deploy this workspace to a shared network location so that all your users can access it. This is achieved by following this procedure:
Important! Before migrating your projects from V8i to CONNECT Edition it is highly recommended that you make a backup of our V8i Project Database and the V8i project files.
To access your V8i projects in the CONNECT Edition you must perform the following tasks:
C:\Program Files\Bentley\Substation CONNECT Edition\Substation\Electrical\SqlScripts\SQL_UpdateDB.sql
To deploy Bentley Substation CONNECT across your organization, you should perform the following tasks:
You have now successfully deployed the application.