Trimble Business Center

First, perhaps this has been asked previously but I couldn't find the thread. My apologies for re-posting if that's the case.

Is it possible in the New Layer Manager to add a feature to have layers grouped as they are in the main TBC view filter? I realize that it is easy to assign a layer to a group in the Layer Manager but to have them appear down the left side "grouped" would be a real help.

Marshall

You can get pretty close to what you're looking for by sorting by the Layer Group in the Layer Manager. Click on the column header "Group Layer" and it will sort ascending or descending similar to the View Filter Manager. The only thing missing is a header bar separating the groups. I use this alot when cleaning up projects. It's very useful.

Richard: Thanks for the tip. It certainly helps.

I am hoping that if the group idea can be added that it can collapse the groups like in the view filter and reduce the 'length' of the layer list in the manager and make it easier to navigate.

Variable width columns would also tidy it up a bit.

Marshall

100% agree Marshal, collapsible groups in the manager would certainly be useful and convenient. However, I'm guessing that it would probably take a substantial effort to implement and since we already have the ability to sort by groups, which kinda does what you're suggesting, the change may sadly end up as a low priority. I would imagine the question "Is the juice worth the squeeze" gets asked a lot in TBC development meetings. LOL.

Richard: Thanks again for the input. I totally get the "juice worth the squeeze" thing (I designed bicycles for 20 years and it was always a priority for product decisions).

The screenshot speaks for itself. This is the very start of a project with only 75 Layers. This will grow to a few times that along with more groups. This is on a 4K 32" monitor and the Layer Manger 'as is' is a monster to look at and find single layers even with sort by field.

How about Group Tabs in the Layer Manager? That would work and would be more easily implemented. Every time a Group is created it adds a tab to the Manager (although, Groups would be more "compact").

I can accept "low priority" 

Marshall

Marshall - I feel your pain my friend. I'm currently working with 25 groups and that's down from almost 40 before I combined a few. There's nearly 300 layers! And I agree collapsible groups would certainly be convenient. Not so sure about the tabs though.  Prior to 5.00.01 it was a real burden getting to the layer you want. I'm not sure if you are aware but if you right click on the layer in question in the view filter manager, select layer manager, the program will highlight and bring you directly to the layer in question in the layer manager greatly helping navigate a large list of layers. I rarely scroll the layer manager since the .01 patch. Right click in the VFM for the win! 

Richard: Great Tip. Thanks. Anything helps.

I hear you guys - the enormity of Layer Lists is a problem, and navigating them effectively is a challenge that consumes a lot of time daily for a lot of people. We added Layer Groups while I was building Models for the Beijing New Airport in China - in that project there were 2600 CAD Files for each Design Revision and each CAD File had hundreds of Layers in them and they were all in Chinese (You could argue that Chinese is little different to some of the naming conventions we see in N America ....) so Layer Groups I saw as an absolute Must to help manage the complexity - that was a first step of course.

There are two things that I think we need to do here

1) Add the ability to turn Layer Group On and Off in the Advanced View Filter controls (this would allow me to have Layer Groups that I am not using right now hidden from view - that means while I am building Existing or Design or Utilities etc I only need show the Layer Groups that I care about, and we can define View Filters to leverage that which would help enormously to keep the Layer Group / Layer List as short as possible.

2) I don't disagree that with the Layer Manager having the Layer Groups could be helpful (as more than a Sort Control (which helps) but doesn't really solve the problem of making the lists shorter to work with - the main challenge with using that Sort Control is that the Layer Names are no longer Alphabetically sorted (which is not an issue if you have a Prefix on the Layer Names that is similar to your Layer Groupings (e.g. UTIL - or SHEET - or ROAD -  etc. which I use a lot to keep myself square. I use these Prefixes so that it it is easy to get to the start of the SHEET Layers by typing S for example to jump around. Once you have those Prefxes in your mind R = Road, S = Sheet, U = Utili becomes second nature and makes the lists faster to navigate

I do hear you on this one though believe me and I have these in as requests already - but Juice and Squeeze is always a reality and we have finite resources to work with like everyone else.

Alan

Hi, Not sure if this question relates to the original. I am looking for a way to select layers by 'advance select' of words or numbers within the layer name and either merge these layers or create a layer group. For example, wanting to select all asbuilt conc layers. In this case the data will not be feature code processed. So relayering by point description is not going to work in this situation. 

Advanced Select only works on Objects not on Layers / Layer Names. If you

want to select all of the data on a number of Layers and you are picking

out the layers by Name or Partial Name - I would

1) Open Layer Manager

2) Select the Layers that you want to select the Members from

3) Make sure that Plan View is Active

4) Tap the Select Members from the Layer Manager

Now that you have the Members Selected - from Properties you can select the

Layer that you want to put all the selected objects on (that effectively

"Merges" the selected objects onto the new selected layer.

If you want to make a Layer Group from the Layers Selected, then while they

are selected you can add the selected layers to a Layer Group from Layer

Manager - just select the Layer Group for one of the selected Layers and it

will change it for all those layers

On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 3:58 PM allison_laitinen@sitechcs.com <

I agree.  I think it would be helpful if the list of layers in the select by layer command were grouped by layer groups, such that you could expand and select individual layers or just select the group and get all the objects on all the layers in the group.

#lowpriority