Data Shortcuts Come of Age

The Project Team Can Work Together

One of the first questions I was asked about Civil 3D was regarding project workflow.  Since several individuals were working on a project together they needed a way to share, let’s say a topo surface, between several project members.  In the early days Civil 3D didn’t have much for this.  Then data shortcuts appeared allowing the referencing of data, surfaces, alignments, and so forth, between several team members.  This was followed by Vault – a big change for a similar need.  Although this was a space where a project team could share information (plus some other very valuable functions) the perceived maintenance of the Vault and Vault server scared some firms.  Data shortcuts seemed to do the same project related work without the overhead.

I’ll admit I’m a Vault fan.  I like the data sharing capabilities, but I really like the data protection and versioning that it provides.  Realistically, however, it isn’t a fit for a lot of firms.  The problem was, as data shortcuts were reintroduced, they weren’t up to the task that could have been handled by the Vault.  We were stuck in between two potentially great tools.

With the release of Civil 3D 2009 the data shortcuts have come roaring back.  They’re stable, dependable, and easy to work with.  There is even a Data Shortcut Editor that if a link gets broken you can easily fix it.  The data shortcuts still don’t do the versioning of the drawings that Vault did, but as for project sharing they have come of age.

The user can interact with data shortcuts in the Prospector (Master View).  You will need to assign a folder where the shortcuts are held.  This is handy since you can change the folder per project to help manage your data.  In the folder an XML file will be stored that does the work of referencing and updating the objects.  If the topo surface your team is using changes, each file it is referenced in gets a notice and the opportunity to update immediately.

If you are involved in team projects where data needs to be shared concurrently, you need to at least be looking at data shortcuts.  You can save time and effort while your team works on the same data at the same time.