Set Up an External Standard Layering Convention

Before you can use the Map Layers command to move and map the source layers of imported data to standard layers, you need to set up an external standard layering convention. This process requires working through several commands.

You should maintain an administrative layering convention project file just for the purposes of creating and maintaining the external standard layering convention. That same project file can also be used to establish and maintain your organization’s material and site improvement library. Using the same file for both purposes will be advantageous since the layering convention will commonly be dependent on that library and it will have to be in the form of an internal Project Library, as this administrative process is undertaken, even though the end result will be stored and deployed as an external material and site improvement library.

Prerequisites:

To set up an external standard layering convention:

  1. Use the New Project command to create a new project. The project will normally only have the default 0 and Points layers defined.

    or

    Use the Open Project command to open a project in which some or all of your standard layers may have already been defined, and within which your external material and site improvement library can be opened.

  2. Use the New Layer command to create each of the standard layers that you want to be contained within the external standard layering convention. Establish the desired layer color and linestyle for each layer. You may wish to protect the layers created within the administrative layering convention project file, just to prevent inadvertent deletion from that administrative file, since they will always be empty in that file. However that is not a necessity, since the state of the layer’s protected property will not be stored within the .mxl file that will contain the external standard layering convention.

    When you are creating the layers, consider the variety of data you receive from various sources and how you want to consolidate those objects onto a simple and consistent (yet comprehensive) set of layers.

  3. Use the Material and Site Improvement Manager command to create or reference the particular external library in which you wish the external standard layering convention to be saved.

    If you need to create additional materials and/or site improvements, make sure that you create these within the external library and then copy them into the administrative layering convention project file’s internal Project Library. The process described here requires that materials and site improvements be defined within both the Project Library and the External Library.

    Tip: The easiest procedure is to create or edit material and site improvement definitions in the external library and copy those into the project library.

    Ultimately, the external material and site improvement library needs to contain the following information:

    • A complete library of all material and site improvement definitions which you may normally encounter
    • Layer definitions associated with your external standard layering convention
    • Layer mapping information by which you have established a correlation between specific layers used by known data sources and your own standard layers
  4. If you have license for the Categorize Takeoff Layers command, use it to categorize the standard layers that you have created, as they will be needed to run a Takeoff Report.
  5. Use the Categorize Takeoff Layers command to assign an appropriate site improvement to each of the standard layers, where that is applicable.
  6. Make sure that any newly created or edited material and site improvement definitions found within the internal library also exist within the external library.
  7. After having created all of the desired standard layers, and after having categorized them and assigned site improvements as may be applicable, use the Map Layers command to add your standard layers to the external material and site improvement library.
  8. Save the project template with a name such as External Standard Layer Convention, and save the related external material and site improvement library.
  9. Use the Map Layers command to map source layers from newly imported data to standard layers stored in the library.

Dependencies:

  • None

Related topics

Map Takeoff Layers