While the number of components included in a typical catalog can reach several thousands, a specification is much smaller, with the number of individual components numbering in the hundreds, or perhaps thousands. You can think of a specification as a subset of all the components in a catalog. Whereas the catalog includes all of the components that you can use at any given time, the specification includes only those components that you can use in a particular project.
Specifications
The Specification Builder provides you with the tools and options necessary for creating specifications that you can use in Smart Isometrics. The Specification Builder lends itself to being a batch process tool that emulates the piecemeal approach of building up a specification from a catalog by defining individual filters, copying and pasting them between various components, and then running modifiers on the new specification. Using the Specification Builder, you can:
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Create definitions and run them against a source database (master) to filter the results.
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Output the results to a new database or to an existing database.
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Save the filters and modifiers that you create as a definition file that can be retrieved and re-run when required.
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Use modifiers to change the output database from the source database.
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Copy and paste filters and modifiers between component types.
Catalogs
In some instances, you may want to create a single, or even a master, catalog. The software allows you to combine any number of existing specifications to create a single catalog by using either the standard copy and paste functionality or the Catalog Builder. With copy and paste, you simply copy material data from one or more source databases and then paste that data into a destination database, which effectively becomes the new catalog. Although copy and paste provides flexibility in terms of filtering and modifying material data, processing times can be slow when working with large databases. An alternative, and frequently quicker, method is to use the Catalog Builder.
Because the Catalog Builder merges all the data from all the selected specifications
in order to create a single catalog, you must ensure that the material data within
each selected specification is compatible with the material data in the other selected
specifications.
What do you want to do?