Tuesday, September 3, 2013

"Template" pre-loaded with worksets

I’m not sure if this has been blogged about before, or who even suggested this at our firm, but our template isn’t a real template; it’s a workshared project with worksets.


Note that every link has a dedicated workset. This allows us to be selective about which links we want to load when we first open up our active project.

Some of the benefits are:
-    multiple people can work on the template, at the same time
-    workset naming standards is established, everybody is familiar with these
-    shorter initial set up time

but more importantly:
-    view templates can be set to include what worksets should be visible or hidden. In my opinion, this one is huge; it’s otherwise impossible to complete the setup of your views & view templates prior to starting the project.

Be cautious though, if somebody starts a new project without detaching their copy, they could do a lot of damage. This is why our template files are located on a drive that just a few people have writing permission to. When we start a new project, there are two different approaches: open a detached copy of the template model, or opening the template model and doing a Save As with the ‘Make this a Central Model after Save’ option checked. The starting view has a reminder for the person setting up the project.


Thoughts?

1 comment:

  1. I started doing this a few years ago when Revit Server came out. It allowed us to keep our template file stored on the Revit Server, which has local servers (accelerators) in all of our offices making the template available to everyone locally. Since Revit Server only allows workset enabled projects to be stored on it, it was a natural decision to pre-build all of our worksets into the template.

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