Hello and welcome to another CAD clip presented by DG CAD. We are talking about here is network palettes and this is the first part of a two part tutorial. We are talking about network palettes. In this lesson, we are going to just talk about the theory and kind of a high level view of how they work and then the part two lesson will be in actual demonstration on what we are going to talk about in this lesson so the first thing we want to talk about is network palettes what they do, why you would want to use them is for manageability and that means that rather than controlling your palettes over here individually on the user side which is fine, we can have a mix of different tool palettes and these are all local to the user and they can go in and change and edit and modify these which is fine but then we also want some company palettes or palettes that are not changeable that are maybe controlled by the CAD manager and that is when we get into network palette. So, why we use them is for manageability.

In this way, everyone has the same tools or tool palettes and the CAD manger control it all from one locations so this good news for the CAD managers who want to set up users so they have everything at their fingertips and everything is always functioning and working and then it makes their job easier and they can have a consistent environment so that is what helps us with the palettes. Also there is project based palette using the project navigator which is similar understanding but we use the project navigator so it is basically is controlled the same way but we have to engage the project navigator. In this particular set of lessons, we are not going to really include the project navigator. We are going to just do this kind of free form. So, I have just got a bit of a bubble diagram. I love a bubble diagram and what we have here is just an overview of how things work to make it easy.

So, what we have to do to start with this we have to have a styles.DWG file or a drawing file that has all the styles we want. These are the doors styles, the window styles, the roof styles, all the different styles and we save that file and we save that somewhere in the network location that everyone can get to. That is in a folder that maybe is read only but at least read only on the server or somewhere where everyone can get to. So, we can have one style drawing or we can have many styles drawings. Just be organized on where you put them and we will show you that in the demo. Then we also create a catalog file and a catalog file is also saved to similar type location, not necessarily the same folder but on the server under your CAD support somewhere, we save this catalog files and what happen is we open up this actual drawing file in our ADT and we create a temporary palette.

We drag all the style tools from the style manager to the temporary palette and then we take them from the temporary palette and drag them to the catalog. We cannot drag straight from the style manager of this drawing into the catalog. That is why we have to create this temporary palette which can be erased. Then once we save this drawing to here and we save this drawing back to here then on the user side, all they have to do is go into their project content browser up over here and then they go add a catalog and they browse to this catalog which is saved somewhere in here and they open it up and everything is there and then they can just drag the palette they want into their environment and then that network palette will show up over here and it will have a little icon down here for refreshing and that will be a network palette so you can have a mishmash of your own personal palettes or network palettes in the user environment and these are going to be a network palettes.

So, these palettes controlled by the catalog are not editable from here but they will always be current so then the backbone everything happens back in here. Everything gets save and then gets saved to there and the user drags these palettes in. Maybe there is new palette based on a project or particular client. Your CAD manager creates the data back your saves it to here and then the user simply goes in and opens the catalog and then drags the palette in and everything is there. So, we actually have some step by step processes over here we are going to go through before we do our demo on our next lesson so let us just talk a bit about this. Network palettes first, the first step here is prepare the style or styles drawing and that will contain all the pertinent objects styles, walls, doors, windows. That is step one. Save the file to a network shared folder somewhere on the server in a read only probably folder so no one can edit them and accessible to all users, that is the second step.

Third step, open the content browser and create a new catalog that is saved in a shared read only folder accessible by the users. Now you are creating the catalog the other cloud. Create the categories and empty palettes ready to receive the styles so in here, we prepare and organize our catalog for the tools then we go back to our styles drawing. We open it up. We create a temporary palette which we will show you in the demo. You open the style manager, you drag the styles one by one to the temporary palette then you go to that temporary palette and use a copy and paste to copy and paste the tools from the palette to the content browser. So, we will see that in that demo. It is a little hard to understand with words but maybe you can reread that and then the next step at the user station, you open the content browser. Now you are in the user station. All the back work is done and then you go to the content browser and you say add an existing catalog and then you browse to that catalog file on the server, open it up and you will see all the palettes that have been made and then you drag them back into your editing window then they show up here with your palettes set.

So, you will note also there will be a refresh button down in the lower right and then add and control and test the palettes from one location. So, after that, it is a matter of experimenting on how it works and how you can update and manage your palettes from back here and the user gets them up here so tune in to the second part of this tutorial which is the actual demonstration of what we have just talked about.