I am currently starting a database of selected manufacturer libraries and several user defined products. This database of products will need to be accessable to anyone in the office who has StarDraw. I have made a standard template that would include the company title block and sheet layouts as per company standard and I was under the impression that when others would open this company template that the list of UDPS and manuf libraries would open with it, but from the few other computers I have tried the template on this doesn't seem to be the case. Could anyone please give me some insight on how I could go about making these libraries accessable by others (ideally they would automatically load when they open the template).

I believe our current config using Visio has all the products saved as a visio stensil template and we have those saved on to our internal server which is accessable to everyone. However, StarDRaw doesnt appear to allow me to save the manuf libraries that are applicable to us and the UDP's in this fashion so I am unsure how to go about making them accessible to others.

If someone could tell me how or where StarDraw does save these UDP's and selected manuf libs it might help me to figure out a way to make them accessable by others. Do the UDPs and selected manufs save on to each individual computer, within the StarDraw files on each computer, on to the USB activation key, into the drawing file or into an external file?

Thanks.

-Eric

Eric,

User Defined Products are stored in a SQL CE Database File: user.sdf which, on Windows 7, is stored in the following directory location:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Stardraw.com Ltd\Stardraw Design 7\1.0.0.0

You can copy this file onto other computers and you can then see and use the User Defined Products for use in your projects.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Hi David.

You ask a good question.

We are working on a solution that will make sharing your UDPs very easy, but it does make some assumptions...

Are all your colleagues on the same local area network? If so, do you all have access to a local SQL Server?

Do your colleagues need to access the UDP when they are "on the road" or "on-site"? In other words, do they need to have a local copy of the database?

Would it be satisfactory if this "shared database" was on the Internet/Cloud ?

We'd love to hear your thoughts so that we implement the right solution for you.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Hi David.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Do you really need access to all your colleagues UDPs (User Defined Products) when you don't have Internet access?

Note that you can still open your projects and edit them - even if they have your colleagues UDPs in them as the project is completely self-contained.

Therefore, if you think you are going to need them when you don't have Internet access, then you can just add them to your project or a temporary project beforehand.

There are really 2 big issues with sharing UDPs:

1. What happens if 2 people make a change to the same UDP at the same time? We would just determine that latest takes priority.

2. If we synchronize everyones UDPs to everyone else then that is going to consume a LOT of bandwidth and storage on everyone's machine. Imagine one user puts a 10 MB image inside a UDP !! Everyone will suddenly get a copy of that and there is nothing they can do - except stop sharing the whole library.

If all UDPs are stored on the cloud and you just retrieve them when you want them, then you are only going to suffer the download if you happen to use that product in a project.

Remember - some people could produce thousands of UDPs and you may only want one or two of them.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Would it be possible to have an import UDP option in StarDraw? I am aware that the current way to share UDPs across multiple uses is to copy and paste the SQL file (C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Stardraw.com Ltd\Stardraw Design 7\1.0.0.0). However, the ideal way to share the UDP's for me is to have a master file saved on to our office shared drive and when a user would connect from their computer on to our local network and open StarDraw they can go File > Import > Import UDPs. This way there would be a master list that will be the most current and if someone needed the file to work offline they could copy it on to their temporarily.

Our company uses SharePoint file management system so the issue of having someone add or change the master UDP file wouldnt be an issue because the system manages who can sign out the one file and edit it and check it back in to update the file to the new version. This prevents duplicates or issues with more than one user editing the file at once since all can use the file at the same time but only one person at a time can make changes.

Given this, would it be possible to have the import UDPs from file option as opposed to having to copy and paste it into the above mentioned directory?

Thanks.

-Eric

That's an interesting idea, but it would mean that your UDPs would be overwritten with someone else's UDPs if they have the same Manufacturer and Model Number.

This is also a manual process that has to be performed by each and every user every time there is a change.

While this process might solve propogating a master copy to individual users from time to time, it doesn't solve trying to share your UDPs with your colleagues.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Thanks for your quick reply.

Ideally most Christie porducts and most products we use would be in the StarDraw Manufacturers Products list and the UDP list would contain a few misc objects that are generic or standard symbols used in our drawings. Most of the items we use in drawings do not change more than a handful of times a year so the concern about others updating files isn't a big issue. Also, typically one person would be assigned to UDP master list mgmt and any updates to UDPs or requests for new ones would go through them. But it would help ease transition if we could try to maintain the configuration as mentioned in my last post as it seems to be something that worked well in the past and is a feature StarDraw is already very close to being able to adopt as well.

On a similar note, will there be the possibility to change the directory of UDPs to be able to show up in the StarDraw Products list. If we had 50 of our products under the Christie submenu and 5 that had to be created by UDPs it would be helpful to be able to store the UDPs with the existing Christie products, at least until we can submit the new UDPs to StarDraw to add to the manuf product database or for certain products that policy would not allow us to make public. It would help simply the search process when looking for products if the user didnt use the filter by search and chose instead to do a manual search.

Your feedback is appreciated.

-Eric