21-03-2014, 11:44 AM
Best Practices - Revit Worksharing
Best Practices.pdf (Size: 117.96 KB / Downloads: 106)
Work Sharing Best Practices:
These Guidelines and Best Practices are intended to be a springboard for internal discussion within
your Firm, and to share a wealth of knowledge accumulated through Ideate’s extensive collaboration
with architectural and engineering firms nationwide.
Central File – The Central File coordinates and propagates the changes of each user and
keeps track of which worksets, and elements are available. It acts as the distribution point for
information about worksets and for changes to the project building model.
•Save to Central – The only time it is necessary to save locally is when you are about to
close the file or exit Revit. When the Save to Central dialog comes up as part of closing the file
(or exiting Revit), the local save button is checked. In this situation you definitely do want to
save to you local file after saving to central (otherwise the local file will be invalid). Actually
Save to Central always synchronizes the local file with the central file, whether you check the
"save local file" checkbox or not. It does that in memory, affecting what you see on the screen,
so you'll immediately see the changes other people have saved to central. The "save local file"
checkbox just controls whether the result is immediately saved to your local disk drive. There is
generally no need to save the file to disk locally right after a save to central unless you are
about to close the file. Always save local before closing the file, otherwise it will become
incompatible with the central file.
New Local File Each Day – The current best practice is to have users start each new day
by creating a new local file. This can easily be done by simply using copy/paste (from Windows
Explorer) on the central file to a local hard drive location. Next rename the copied with the local
file naming convention (project name-user name-local.rvt).
•Audit – Open the central file and check the Audit option, then re-save and compact the file. If
this is done on a regular basis (weekly is the Ideate recommendation), file size is reduced and
speed is increased.
To perform an Audit, when opening the central file select the Audit check box at the bottom of
the Open dialog box. This will display a warning that indicates that auditing a file may take a
while and that you should use this process on large files to aid in better performance and prior
to upgrading the file to a new release of Revit.
[b]•Compact File [/b]– Compacting the file should result in the file being slightly faster to open and
save. The only reason the file isn't compacted on every save is that compacting itself takes
time. Think of compacting the file as being like cleaning up your office: after you clean it up it’s
faster to find things, but you wouldn't want to clean it up every time you put something down --
instead just clean it up once in a while when it gets cluttered.
Remote Working with Worksharing
You can add new elements to an existing workset without making the workset editable, even if
you are disconnected from the central file. You can continue to edit these new elements until
you reconnect and save to central.
If a workset is owned by you and you are disconnected from the central file you may still work
on the items within the workset. Other team members connected to the central file see your
workset as owned by you and not editable. You cannot perform the borrowing of elements
when disconnected from the central file. If you attempt to perform element borrowing, you will
receive an error that you cannot edit non-editable elements. You can however checkout
another workset. This becomes a workset “at risk”.
If another team member checks out a workset while connected to the central file and you check
out a workset while disconnected, you both can make changes to the elements within the
workset. When you login back to the network, the project will attempt to re-establish the link
between your local copy and the central file. If you checked out additional worksets while
disconnected from the central file you will not be able to re-link with the central file. You will
need to open your local file and detach from the central file, then you can copy/paste
information back to the central file.