Master the process of setting up your drawing for the creation of data shortcuts in Civil 3D. Understand the similarities between data shortcuts and survey database settings, learn how to establish data shortcuts folders and initiate a new data shortcut project folder to aid Civil 3D in referencing your drawings across the platform.
Key Insights
- Setting up a drawing to create data shortcuts includes establishing a working folder and creating a new data shortcut project folder. This allows Civil 3D to reference the drawings across the platform rather than just in a specific file.
- A working folder and data shortcuts project folder is created by navigating to the tool space prospector tab, right clicking on 'data shortcuts', and setting the working folder for the class. Once the working folder is set, a new data shortcut project folder can be created.
- Once the data shortcuts are set up, new files can be opened and data shortcuts can be created for available objects. This step involves selecting 'create data shortcuts', allowing Civil 3D to locate objects in the drawing that can be created as a data shortcut, and adding the identified objects as data shortcuts.
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Now that we've talked about data shortcuts and external references and the difference between the two, what we're going to go ahead and do in this video is set up our drawing to allow us to create some data shortcuts. The thing to understand about data shortcuts is that the settings for data shortcuts is similar to the settings for our survey database.
So the data shortcuts information is going to be a database that's shared across all of Civil 3D. When we create our data shortcuts folders, Civil 3D is going to be able to reference those across all the drawings inside of Civil 3D rather than just the one specific file that we're working in. So what we're going to go ahead and do is navigate over to the tool space prospector tab.
We're going to go to data shortcuts. We're going to right click on data shortcuts, and we're going to go ahead and set our working folder. So inside of our working folder, we're going to go ahead and make sure that we're selecting the working folder for this class.
So I'm going to go ahead and go to mine, which is a desktop Civ 203 working folder. I'm going to go ahead and select that folder. And then Civil 3D is going to set my working folder as my Civ 203 working folder.
So once we've set the working folder, we can go ahead and right click, and we're going to go ahead and create a new data shortcut project folder. We can't set a data project, a data shortcut project folder because we don't have one yet, so we now have to create a new one. If you already had data shortcut project folders and you wanted to switch between them, all you have to do is go ahead and set your working folder and then set a new or set your data shortcut project folder.
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We don't have one. We're going to go ahead and create a new one. When we select new, we're going to go ahead and select our working folder, which we've set here, and it's grayed out, so we can't change it.
Then we're going to choose the name of our data shortcut folder. I'm going to call this Civ 203 data, and then I am going to type in data shortcuts for Civ 203 course. Then from here, you have the option for using project templates.
If you have a template file that you want to use when you're bringing in this data, you can do that. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as not checked, and I'm going to click OK. Now what you can see in here is that data shortcuts now has a file path here.
We have mine is set to C user trainer desktop, Civ 203 working folder, Civ 203 data, which is, in fact, our data shortcut project folder. So from here, now we have the ability to create data shortcuts. Now you have to have data to create a data shortcut.
So to do that, we're going to have to open up a new file. So I'm going to go to my start tab. I'm going to select open.
I'm going to go to my working folder, and I'm going to go ahead and select this Civ 203 data.dwg that you have from your course file download. So I'm going to go ahead and click
Open for that drawing file, and this drawing file should look pretty familiar. It's almost identical to what we created in the 202 course.
So from here, we have information like corridors, alignments, surfaces, profiles. We haven't created any pipe networks or pressure networks, so we're not going to be able to create any data shortcuts for those, but we can create data shortcuts for any of the other objects. So to do that, what we have to do is select data shortcuts, right click, and select create data shortcuts.
When you select create data shortcuts, what Civil 3D is going to do is it's going to look to all of the objects that you have inside of this drawing that can be created as a data shortcut. We have our surfaces. I'm going to go ahead and check surfaces box and add in all of the surfaces from this drawing as data shortcuts.
Moving on from there, I'm going to go ahead and choose my dev branch alignment as a data shortcut. I'm also going to go ahead and choose my dev main as an alignment data reference. Now moving on from there, I have all of these other alignments that were created when I was creating my corridors.
I don't want to add these in. What you will notice is that with the alignments, the profiles that are associated with those alignments automatically get added in. I could uncheck them if I wanted to.
I don't want to do that, so I'm going to go ahead and leave them, and then I'm going to go ahead and navigate down here. You can continue to see all of the alignments that are available, and then we have the corridors. Because I know that the surfaces that I have up here are built from the corridors that are down here, I don't need to bring these corridors in.
They've been designed, but the main purpose in my design of these corridors was to get a surface. So I'm going to go ahead and not check them off. If we decided later that we wanted to add them in, we could always come back to this drawing, right click, select create data shortcuts, add these in, but for now I'm not going to check them off.
I'm going to go ahead and click okay, and what we have here now is that you'll notice that we have expanded surfaces and alignments and centerline alignments with dev branch and dev main. We've created these data shortcuts. I'm going to go ahead and close this data folder.
It's going to ask me to save. I'm not sure. I want to make sure I'm saving this, so I'm going to go ahead and click yes, even though we didn't make any changes to this exact drawing.
Now we have our Civ 203 grad folder open, and you'll notice that I have all of the data references in here now available for me to use because we created that folder where all those data references are going to get saved to, and Civil 3D is using that working folder across all drawings inside Civil 3D rather than just the one specific drawing that we were in. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and save this drawing, and I'll meet you in the next video where we'll bring these data references into the drawing that we're working inside of.
