Chapter 20 Worksharing Most projects involve more than one person working at any given time. It’s not uncommon for many people to work together to meet deadlines and crank out a set of construction documents. Keeping with the theme of an integrated single-file building model, Revit allows for this workflow without breaking apart the model. A complex model can be edited by many people at once using what is called worksharing . Linked file-sharing methodology is best applied to campus-scale projects where independent buildings are being designed for a large site. All team members work on separate files for each of the buildings, and the files are linked into a master site plan to produce a final project. In this chapter, we’ll focus on enabling the worksharing feature of Revit. In this chapter, you’ll learn to do the following: ◆ Set up a project with worksets ◆ Move elements between worksets ◆ Create a central file and local files ◆ Save to and load from the central file ◆ Request permission to use elements owned by other team members and grant others permission to use your elements Worksharing Using the Workset Methodology We first need to discuss some core concepts about worksharing before we can discuss how to imple- ment it. Worksharing in Revit refers to the use of worksets to divide up the model for the purpose of sharing data between many people. A workset is a collection of building elements and components (floors, roofs, walls, windows, and so on) that can be edited by only one team member at a time. By default, worksharing is not enabled when you start a project in Revit because the software assumes you are working in a single user environment until you tell it otherwise. You share your work by first creating a central file . This is the repository where all the individual work on the project is collected. Worksharing Warning Once you enable worksharing in a model, you can’t undo it. We suggest that you make a copy of your file before you enable worksharing so you keep an unshared version as a backup. 44831.book Page 617 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 618 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING Once the central file has been established, each team member makes a local copy of it. All work is done directly in this copied—but still associated—local file. This enables all users to open their local file simultaneously (see Figure 20.1). Figure 20.1 The worksharing concept The elements in each separate file are still tied to an ownership rule linked to the central file, making it impossible to edit an element in your local file if that same element is owned by someone else in another local file. Remember, Revit is a database. In effect, you’re getting permissions for one or more elements from the central database. Once you have permission for an element and modify it, no one else can make changes to that element until it is reconciled with the central file. This occurs when you use the Save To Central command (hereafter referred to as STC) and copy your work back to the network. If one user has ownership of an element, no other user can edit that element until its permissions, and any changes to it, are reconciled with the central file. Worksets allow you to group many elements into virtual collections of objects for the purpose of managing visibility and file performance. To that end, there are a number of benefits to enabling worksets beyond allowing multiple team members to work within the same file: ◆ Turning off and on the visibility of elements that aren’t being worked on or are not needed for the current tasks ◆ Unloading data heavy portions of the model to speed performance ◆ Quickly getting permission of groups of elements When you enable worksharing, a new tab appears in the Visibility/Graphic Overrides dialog for the worksets (see Figure 20.2). You can turn on or off any workset in any view though this tab. Additionally, you can make those settings part of any of your view templates. Figure 20.2 Workset visibility 44831.book Page 618 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. WORKSHARING USING THE WORKSET METHODOLOGY 619 Worksharing Basics Revit’s worksharing features are designed to accommodate any division of labor you see fit. There are no inherent restrictions in how you use worksharing to divide up a model. For example, you can break up a model and have one group work on the shell and one work on the interior core. You can turn worksharing on at any stage of the project, and you can create or remove worksets during the project cycle. By default, the Worksets toolbar isn’t activated in Revit. To turn on the toolbar, right-click in a blank area of the toolbars at the top of the screen and select Worksets from the flyout menu. You can then start worksharing in either of two ways: ◆ Choose File  Worksets from the main menu. ◆ Click the Worksets button on the Worksets toolbar. It will be the only active button on the Work- sets toolbar. Either of these actions opens a dialog box telling you that you’re about to enable worksharing and that once it’s enabled it can’t be undone (Figure 20.3). Revit will create two worksets: Shared Levels And Grids contains the levels and gridlines from the project, and everything else in the model is placed in Workset1. Figure 20.3 Activating worksets within a project In addition to the two worksets created automatically when you initialize worksharing, there are three other types of worksets that Revit maintains in a project: view worksets, family worksets, and project standards worksets. Views worksets Each view in a project has a dedicated view workset. It contains the view prop- erties and any view-specific elements (text, dimensions, tags, and so on). View-specific elements cannot be moved to another workset. You can take ownership of any view in Revit by simply right- clicking it in the Project Browser and choosing Make Workset Editable (see Figure 20.4). This will give you ownership of the view workset and all of the view-specific annotations, allowing you to 44831.book Page 619 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 620 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING easily and quickly make modifications to any of the 2D content within the view. This is a handy feature during the construction document phase when much of the work is segregated to view worksets for dimensioning and annotations. Figure 20.4 Making a view workset editable Family worksets For each family loaded in the project, a workset is automatically created. When editing properties of a family, you will take ownership of that family unless someone else already “owns” it. You can add families to each of the views without having ownership over view worksets, but you cannot make changes to the families or their properties without having permission. Project standards worksets This workset is dedicated to all the project settings like materials, line styles, tags, dimensions, and so on. Any time you need to edit a project-wide setting, you will be taking ownership of a workset for that setting. Something to keep in mind: you can always add new information, materials, or linestyles to a project without having to own the workset. You only need to take ownership of a workset to edit existing settings. Once you’ve activated the worksets, you’ll see the dialog box shown in Figure 20.5. Also note at the bottom of this dialog box that you have the option to check boxes and turn on visibility for the automatically created worksets we discussed earlier. By default, they are not activated. Figure 20.5 Worksets dialog box 44831.book Page 620 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. WORKSHARING USING THE WORKSET METHODOLOGY 621 In the Worksets dialog box, you can add and remove worksets from the project. A new workset within a project does not automatically contain any model elements or components; it is simply a blank container that you can then begin to fill. When you activate a workset, you become the owner of that workset and all the elements in it. This ownership is what the Yes value in the Editable column refers to; if you are the owner of a workset, the value in the Editable column will be Yes, but if you are not the owner, the value will be No). Workset Organization It’s important that you think of your project as a holistic building when dividing it into worksets. Technically speaking, you don’t need any more than the initial default worksets because Revit manages ownership of elements on a per-element basis and relinquishes elements automatically when you save your changes to the central file. However, you might want to divide up the file into worksets for some of the reasons we described earlier. Some good examples of typical worksets are Shell and Core, Exterior Skin, and First Floor Interior Partitions. Divide your project into worksets that relate to the roles and responsibilities of people working on the project. By default, you don’t need more than two to three worksets per person on the job. When making new worksets, remember the old adage of Mies van der Rohe, “Less is more.” For our Foundations project, we have divided the model into four worksets (see Figure 20.6): Interiors All of the interior walls, furniture, and other items are managed with this workset. Shared Levels and Grids The workset Shared Levels and Grids contains the level and grid information from the model, as was originally established when worksharing was enabled. Shell and Core All the exterior skin of the building as well as the elevator, stair, and toilet cores that are grouped in any typical office building are in this workset. Who Controls Worksets? Worksets are usually activated by the team’s project manager, who initially enables worksharing, creates user worksets, and assigns people and tasks for the project. Thinking Worksets One of the biggest challenges facing teams new to Revit is losing the legacy of “layers.” Many teams that have been drafting in 2D CAD immediately want to begin managing worksets as they would manage a CAD drawing. They make a workset for doors and one for walls and one for windows. Remember that all of your objects are in one file and you can control visibility of those objects through the Visibility/ Graphics dialog. Not only is there no need to put your doors into a separate workset, but doing so will actually make your model more difficult to manage. What happens when you have ownership of the doors, your teammate has ownership of the walls, and you want to move or add a door? You can’t do so because you don’t own the entire assembly. You have to own the door and the wall it goes into to make those changes. 44831.book Page 621 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 622 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING Site The topography (toposurface) and any site-specific elements in the project are put into this workset. Figure 20.6 Workset organization Notice that Workset1 has been renamed. The title is not descriptive enough to be of use, so it can be deleted once all the model elements have been moved to relevant worksets. The worksets we’ve set up demonstrate how a typical breakdown might occur in a project of this size, but it’s by no means limited to this scheme. Depending on how you structure work in your office, the worksets might be quite different. Once in a workset environment, you can see or change an object’s workset by accessing its prop- erties. At the bottom of the dialog, you can see which workset an object or group of objects are placed in, and you can toggle between the created worksets (see Figure 20.7). Note that you can move elements to other worksets only if you own the elements. You do not need to own the entire workset to do this, just the individual elements. Additionally, you can tell what workset an object belongs to by hovering your cursor over the object and waiting for the tooltip to appear. This tooltip will give you a host of information about the object in question. In the following example, the workset is Shell and Core, the element is also part of the Walls category, the name of the family is Basic Wall, and the family type is A3 - 4 3/4˝. Keeping It Simple For our project, creating the Site workset meant renaming Workset1. Because the Shell and Core work- set will have the most elements on it, renaming allowed us to forgo the additional work of moving all those objects to a blank workset. 44831.book Page 622 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. WORKSHARING USING THE WORKSET METHODOLOGY 623 Figure 20.7 Change the workset to which an element belongs by selecting a different workset using the Element properties dialog Moving Elements between Worksets Once the worksets are created, there are some simple steps for moving elements quickly and easily to other worksets. As mentioned, the easiest way to move the bulk of the objects is to not move them at all but simply rename Workset1. After that, it is easiest to do move elements in a subtractive method from a 3D view. The following exercise will walk you through moving elements to their new worksets using a subtractive method to locate model geometry. Note that this should be done while one person is still the solitary owner of all the worksets. 1. Open the default 3D view ({3D}) so that you can see all of your model elements within the project. 2. Open the Visibility/Graphic Overrides dialog, turn off the Site workset, and click OK. Since nothing is in the Site workset, the view should look the same when you are done. 3. Now, in the 3D view, select a comfortable number of the site elements and click the Proper- ties button— comfortable meaning you don’t have to try to select them all at once. In the first Practice Good Workflow As a best practice, do not work directly in the central file once the worksets have been established. Work- ing directly in the central file will change the file attributes and nullify anyone’s ability to STC. Once someone has worked directly in the central file, any work by anyone else will be lost and everyone will be required to make new local copies. Working in the central file should only occur with full knowledge by all the team members and only if there is a file upgrade or some other historically significant event occurring. 44831.book Page 623 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 624 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING image in Figure 20.8, the toposurface and some trees have been selected and are highlighted in red. Figure 20.8 Moving objects between worksets 4. From the Properties dialog, select Site for the Workset value and click OK. All of the elements you selected will disappear (the second image in Figure 20.8). Not to worry: remember, you turned the Site workset off using the Visibility/Graphic Overrides! 5. Using the same technique, you can move the remainder of the site elements to the Site work- set. The same procedure is repeated in order to move the Interior walls to the Interior workset. 44831.book Page 624 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. WORKFLOW 625 At any point in this process, you can check your work by opening the Workset tab in the Visibility /Graphic overrides dialog and unchecking all of the boxes but one to see what is on each workset. Figure 20.9 shows the Interiors workset with all of the interior elements. As you can see, this is a great way to manage visibility without using the object categories. Figure 20.9 The Interior workset Workflow With worksharing, there is always one central file that spawns local files and manages element ownerships. This is the file that changes are saved to and from which you get updated versions of the model. Once the worksets are initialized and the model is divided into various worksets, you will need to complete a few more steps before the team can jump into the model and begin working in a multi-user environment. To use Revit in a workset environment, you do everything any IT manager ever yelled at you for doing: You make a local copy of the central file and work directly off your C: drive. Although this approach is a bad idea for most work in an office environment, for the Revit database, there are several good things about it: ◆ It allows more than one user to make changes to the central file. ◆ Your local copy will be more responsive than a networked file because your access speed to your hard drive is much faster than it is across most networks. ◆ Should anything bad happen to your network or your central file, you will have an up-to- date backup to which you can easily apply the Save As command to make a new central file. Moving Every Instance of an Element A quick way to move every instance of a single element to a new workset is to use the Select All Instances option from the context menu. For example, select a tree in the model, then select all instance of that tree, then open the element properties. You can then change the workset for all those elements in one interaction. 44831.book Page 625 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 626 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING Making a Central File Now that we’ve turned on worksharing, we need to set up the central file to be used by more than one person. To do this, we are going first make a central file located on your network; then we will make the local files to begin working on the project. To make the central file, choose File  Save As and give the model a new name. Before you save, select the Options button at the bottom of the dia- log box and verify that the box Make this a Central File after save is checked (see Figure 20.10). Figure 20.10 Making a central file The reason for the new name is twofold. First, it gives you a backup of your old file before you made the worksets. Backups never hurt. Second, Revit sometimes does not like to have a new file saved over an active file. It can cause file corruption. Making the Local File Now that the central file has been created, we need to make the local files to work from: 1. Make a new, local copy of the central file by dragging the file you just made to your desktop or another location on your hard drive. Be careful not to move the file; you just want to make a copy of it. 2. Now, open this new, local file. The first time any local file is initialized, you will receive the warning message shown in Figure 20.11. All this means is that you’ve made a local file and you will be the owner of the local copy. Figure 20.11 Opening the local file for the first time Once you click OK, you are set and ready to begin working in a worksharing environment. Now that you’re in a worksharing environment, every element added to the file belongs to a workset. Try to keep model elements in a workset other than Shared Levels and Grids because these worksets may be locked down at some point to avoid accidental movement of key datums. To make sure you’re placing elements in the proper workset, check the Worksets toolbar to see what the active workset is. The workset shown in this box is the workset new elements will be assigned to. Remember, you don’t have to be the owner of this workset nor does the workset need to be editable to add new elements to it. 44831.book Page 626 Friday, October 12, 2007 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. [...]... Figure 20. 12, which allows you to customize how you save to central You can choose to relinquish some permissions or none of them, and you can choose to save a local copy at this time (or not) You can also add comments about this particular version you are saving The comments are available in the History dialog box (covered later in this book) Figure 20. 12 Save to Central (STC) dialog In addition, Revit. .. ways: ◆ If you edit or move an element, Revit will grant you permission to own it provided no one else currently owns it ◆ If you can click the puzzle piece icon, and the element is available, Revit will grant you permission to edit or change it ◆ You can right-click the element and choose Make Elements Editable from the context menu (see Figure 20. 13) Figure 20. 13 Making an element editable Note that... shown in Figure 20. 14 This will occur every time you are working in a model in which worksharing is enabled and you are attempting to edit an element that is already owned by someone else on the project Figure 20. 14 Placing Request for permission Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark 629 44831.book Page 630 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM 630 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING... indicating that the element has been modified and an STC needs to occur before permission can be granted (see Figure 20. 17) Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark 631 44831.book Page 632 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM 632 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING Figure 20. 17 Editing requests for changed elements Trying to grant permission at this point will give you the dialog shown... remove this watermark 627 44831.book Page 628 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM 628 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING Loading Work from Other Team Members It’s possible to update your model from the central file without committing your changes to central Think of this process as getting an update of the model To do so, choose File Reload Latest Revit finds the latest changes saved to the central file and brings... your way Clicking this button gives you the dialog shown in Figure 20. 16 From here, you have a few options: Grant Gives permission for the requested element to your teammate Deny/Retract Denies permission to your teammate Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark 44831.book Page 631 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM ELEMENT OWNERSHIP Show Shows you exactly which element... 44831.book Page 631 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM ELEMENT OWNERSHIP Show Shows you exactly which element or elements have been requested to help you make an informed decision Figure 20. 15 Owning and borrowing worksets Figure 20. 16 Editing Requests dialog Once you are ready to grant permission, one of two things will happen If you haven’t made any changes yourself that need to be saved, you can simply... October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM ELEMENT OWNERSHIP Oops Inevitably, with any team of people, someone is bound to make a mistake somewhere in the process It happens; it’s just human nature The important thing is knowing how to recover when those accidents happen On one project we worked on, someone new to the team kept accidentally deleting the west wall of the project while we were deep into CDs Since Revit is... more than one person at a time is critical in any office environment Master It How do you work in a single Revit file on a project team with more than one member in the file at a time? Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark 44831.book Page 633 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM THE BOTTOM LINE Move elements between worksets Inevitably, you will put the right element... File after Save Once everyone on the team makes a new local copy, you’re back in business Borrowing Elements By borrowing elements, team members can take ownership of only some of the elements within a particular workset This can typically be used if you need to modify only one or a few elements in a given workset and do not want to take ownership of the entire workset This is also valuable if you need . 619 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. 620 CHAPTER 20 WORKSHARING easily and. By default, they are not activated. Figure 20. 5 Worksets dialog box 44831.book Page 620 Friday, October 12, 200 7 12:31 AM Please purchase PDF Split-Merge