ARCHIBUS Smart Client

Getting Started with Projects: Overview

To get started documenting your facility, you need to determine which of your facility information should be grouped together in the same project, and then create a new project to store this information.

Basically, any data that you want to be able to access at one time should be in the same project. Thus, if you have two buildings and want to be able to compare the two buildings, they should be stored in the same project. The ARCHIBUS project holds all buildings, floors, rooms equipment, work orders, move orders, leases, and so on.

When you work in AutoCAD or Revit, you are signed in to an ARCHIBUS Project when you launch the CAD application. Once signed in, ARCHIBUS will maintain references to your AutoCAD drawings, Revit Models, and the intelligent entities and objects within them.

To associate floor plan drawings with the project, you open the project and then start a new drawing or open an existing drawing. Bringing drawings into an ARCHIBUS project is covered in the section Creating New Drawings.

You can have multiple project entries for the same database. For instance, you can start the sample Sybase Headquarters (hq.db) project as a Sybase Runtime console, as a Sybase ASA console, or as a Sybase ASA service. You can have both SQL Server Express and one of the Sybase databases installed and running simultaneously. You cannot have both the Sybase ASA and Sybase Runtime running simultaneously as they share the same .db file.

By default, the value of the Active attribute is set to false for all projects (even the database the application is installed on) except Sybase Runtime which is set to true. See Activating Projects for information on how to activate projects run on Sybase ASA or Microsoft SQL Server Express.

Adding Enterprise and Local Projects

There are two type of projects:

Local. You can designate Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server Express projects as local projects. The Smart Client can create, configure, start, and stop local projects for you, simplifying administration.
Enterprise. You can alternately designate projects as enterprise projects, meaning that system administrators have started the database themselves on the database server.

Use the Projects Command to review or edit project information, or to add new projects. The Projects command reads and writes to the afm-projects.xml file directly, simplifying the process of creating and maintaining project information.The Projects command is enabled only if the Installation Type is full.

You can use the Projects command to add enterprise or local projects. Enterprise projects are created by the system administrator on the shared database server. For these projects, you use the Projects command to create the project preferences (afm-projects.xml) entry that lets Web Central and the Smart Client connect to the database. You do not use the Projects command to create the database.

When you create a new local project, you can automatically create a new database and associate it with the project.

New project databases contain the same tables that you've seen in project HQ. New project databases contain a mixture of empty and completed tables.

Most project tables (such as Buildings, Equipment, and Work Requests) will not have any records, so that you can complete the tables with your own data.
Some project tables will be completed with default records. For example, the tables of the Waste Management and Clean Buildings applications will have values that define standard environmental practices. These values can be edited as needed.
The tables defining the ARCHIBUS behavior and database (for example, ARCHIBUS Fields, ARCHIBUS Tasks, and ARCHIBUS Workflow Rules) will have records defining the default behavior of ARCHIBUS and defining the default database. These tables are known as the "schema" and are documented in ARCHIBUS System Management Help.