Publishing documents

The process of managing technical design documents is often as follows:

Creating or modifying a document – Done by the designer, using the CAD system.
Accepting a new or modified document – Done by the project leader, using the CAD system, a document management system or a manual procedure.
Publishing the document as an official document to be used by anybody who needs it for purchasing, manufacturing, erection or control. Usually, this is done by extracting the latest document revision from the document management system (DMS) of the company.

The CADMATIC Plant/Outfitting design applications are 3D model based and their native documents are referencing the current contents of the 3D model. The 3D model is constantly changing, especially in large projects where possibly hundreds of designers are working in parallel.

In the document management process phase, the documents are wanted to be managed as static 2D dump files and associated BOM lists. The contents of a document are supposed to represent a snapshot of the 3D model at the time the document was made public. The different versions of the same document are controlled via assigning revision IDs.

To support a controllable document acceptance and publication delivery process via a DMS, CADMATIC Plant and CADMATIC Outfitting use a special process to publish their native documents, as described below.

Publishing a document

In CADMATIC design applications, the Publish command of the document object browser dialog allows the designer to create a publication from a document.

The publishing causes the following actions to occur internally:

The program exports a DWG file from the drawing. The current drawing export configuration is used to implement property mappings (for example, to select the DWG layer). The DWG file is stored in the publication data.
The program generates the data that is required to implement the links between the 3D model and the drawing labels in CADMATIC eShare. The linking data is stored in the publication data.
The publication data is stored in the document repository and the related COS objects ("Drawing" and "Publication") are set as checked-in.

The next time the user wants to edit a published document, the user is prompted whether to create a new revision of that document. If the user chooses to create a new revision, the revision ID is incremented and all previously published revisions will remain available. But, if the user chooses to edit without incrementing the revision ID, the edited version will overwrite the previously published (latest) revision. This way, the designer has full control over the publication revisions, and for example the following workflow can be supported:

The designer creates a new drawing and thinks that the work is done.
The designer publishes the first revision for acceptance review. (It might be a good idea to add a label such as "Temporary" on the drawing sheet.)
The designer receives some feedback, makes the necessary changes, and publishes the document again. The revision ID stays the same.
The document is accepted and the designer publishes the document for production.
The designer receives feedback from production, makes the necessary changes, and publishes the document again—this time with a new revision ID.

This system is not intended to replace a proper document management system, but it will make it easier to control the process inside the CADMATIC applications and also allows implementation of better, automated integration between eShare and DMS, especially in distributed projects where direct integration with eShare or a DMS server would not be possible at the replica sites.

Technical Details

The document data is stored in files that the COS server manages by using "Drawing" type COS objects to store the control data. Users cannot access these files.

The document publication data is stored in files that the COS server manages by using "Document Publication" type COS objects to store the control data. Users cannot access these files.

Exporting a document publication to a file

The users can export a Document Publication with the Export command of the document object browser dialog. The export only converts the embedded DWG file, without accessing the 3D model. This guarantees that the exported files correspond with the snapshot stored into the publication.

Note: We recommend the following policy:
Always publish the document when you finish the editing.
Export 2D files from the latest publication—not from the drawing itself—if you aim to generate an accurate copy of the latest published document revision.

Exporting a document publication to eShare

If your organization wants to export design drawings to eShare, first the documents must be published in CADMATIC Plant/Outfitting.

For more information on export to eShare, see Working with CADMATIC eShare.