Hi Gergely. Thanks for the help. Some more info below.
– and the purpose of using external data…
The goal is to allow users to create and assign ‘user defined types’ to doors and their sub-elements (frames, leafs, seals, size, vision panels, finishes etc) that impact the 3D model + some other things such as locking, door stops, closer, hinges etc. that will be stored with a door type for scheduling purposes. The external file is used to centrally store the values of the parameters for the user defined types, and push any change to a defined door type of sub-element through the model. Types will be specific to each project. Some project will have 1000+ doors. One of our current projects has about 5000+ doors made up of about 250 different door types, spread across 4 teamwork files, and is the reason why we are investigating this to see if it will provide an efficient way to push change through the projects and standardise door settings for doors that are meant to be the same, but aren’t in the model.
– how often the source will change
Not too often I hope. There will be times when the changes are intense, but hopefully that will be limited to only a couple of periods during the life of the project (late DD and Mid CD). Most of the time, I expect people will just be adding new doors and assigning a type to them, or changing individual doors to a particular type.
– will it be a part of the library, and loaded together with the objects
I haven’t got that far yet. Ideally the external file will live in the project library, but the projects will be teamworked, so I need to investigate the implications of this further. At the moment, while we are testing & developing things, the XML is hosted on our file server (OSX)
Cheers,
Michael.