How to manage network libraries in ArchiCAD 9.
If you have a lot of books, you organize them on the bookshelf according to genre, author, or title. This gives you a system to easily find the book you are looking for. Similarly, ArchiCAD has a built-in algorithm to help you find libraries. Here is how you should ‘put your books on the shelf’:
Not finding your library parts? Get organized! ' If you are TeamWorking, or storing files and libraries on a network server, you have to set up a system to ensure that all the necessary libraries are available to all the users who use the files. This becomes especially important when you link ArchiCAD projects stored on a server into PlotMaker files, since you cannot control the library management of the background ArchiCAD. This article describes the best practices for managing network libraries.
Using Network libraries only The full paths of the libraries accessed by the projectare always saved into the ArchiCAD project files. In case of TeamWork files, ArchiCAD will save those libraries that were loaded when the file was shared. However, the Team Leader can change this by signing into the project with exclusive access, loading/unloading libraries, and sending the changes into the .plp. If all the needed libraries are accessible to the user in the network, ArchiCAD will automatically load them, and the library manager will not appear when opening the file. On MacOS, ArchiCAD will try to auto-mount the necessary network locations. When importing ArchiCAD views into PlotMaker, Background ArchiCAD (BGArchiCAD) will load the libraries automatically too. If you are using local and network libraries, then a local path, available only to the user who last saved the file, will be saved into the file. This local path may not work for the other users accessing the file. In this case, ArchiCAD will not be able to load the libraries from the stored locations, therefore it will ignore all the saved paths, and will auto-search for the libraries. ArchiCAD will search for libraries in the following order: - In the folder where the ArchiCAD executable is installed - At the locations defined in the Projectname.xml file (where projectname is the name of the currently loaded project file. If ArchiCAD is able to collect all the necessary libraries from these locations, then ArchiCAD will open the file without presenting the Library manager. BGArchiCAD will also successfully find all the necessary library parts. If not all of the libraries are found using this algorithm, then ArchiCAD will discard the result of the auto-search, and will bring up the Library Manager (libraries with a working path will be marked as loaded in Library Manager). BGArchiCAD will not load any libraries and will warn you about that. Example
Using Network and local libraries
- In the folder where the Project file is located
The Projectname.xml file Creating an XML file with the same name as the project lets you define the paths of network libraries used by the project. To create a ‘Projectname.xml’, use ‘Default Libraries.xml’ as a template. This file is located at: Windows:Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Graphisoft\ArchiCAD 9.0.0 XXX R1 MacOS: Userhome/Library/Preferences/Graphisoft/AC 9.0.0 XXX v1
': We have two company-default libraries on the network: Library1 in Folder1 on Server1 and Library2 in Folder2 on Server2. The XML will look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<LibraryLocationsFile> <LibraryLocationsList>
<LibraryLocations>lan.flat://Server1/Folder1</LibraryLocations>
<LibraryLocations>lan.flat://Server2/Folder2</LibraryLocations>
</LibraryLocationsFile> Note:' Do not include the name of the library in the path, just the folder that contains it
Principles for Storing Libraries In addition to the fool-proof techniques of keeping everything locally, or keeping everything on the server, you have the option to mix these two techniques. This option gives you the benefit of easy library part management (creating/revising your own parts on the server) combined with fast loading times (standard elements loaded from each user’s local hard drive). If you want to do this, you rely on the auto-library-search function of ArchiCAD, which has a few rules that you have to consider. These are the rules to ensure that all libraries are found automatically by ArchiCAD:
- store
standard ArchiCAD libraries - which you do not modify, like the ArchiCAD 9 library - locally next to the ArchiCAD executable fileNote:' If you use .PLA files as libraries, they have to be on the same level as the ArchiCAD executable. They should not be in nested folders. This also means that if you want to rely on auto-search, you have to copy the content of the standad ‘ArchiCAD Library 9’ a level higher, so that ‘ArchiCAD.exe’ and ‘Object Library 9.pla’ are in the same folder. A better alternative is to extract ‘Object Library 9.pla’ into the ‘ArchiCAD Library 9’ folder and remove the .PLA. This has the benefit that the ‘New and Reset’ option will still load all the necessary libraries.
- store company libraries - where you keep your own parts that you frequently modify - on a server, and include their path in an XML file
Note':' auto-search will fail if there are paths stored in ‘Projectname.xml’ that re not accessible for the user.
- store project-specific libraries next to the project file on the server