1. What is Collaboration G3?
2. Normal CET vs Collaboration 
   • Drawing Space in Collaboration
   • Alternatives in Collaboration
   • Blocks in Collaboration
   • Papers
   • Scenarios

What is Collaboration G3?

Collaboration G3 (known as CollabPro in the marketplace) introduces a new working model to CET Designer which is conceptually different from the regular use of CET to create and manage drawings. Collaboration G3 is expected to support all customer extensions, however there may be some programming required from each extension to ensure that it is fully compliant to the rules and concepts introduced by this Collaboration G3 working model.

This article and others in this section highlight the differences and new concepts in Collaboration G3 for developers to take note of and provide a guideline on how to accommodate for them in their Extensions. 

Or if you would like articles written in a user perspective, you can read articles in this section.

Normal CET vs Collaboration 

In the normal CET working model, a user creates and makes changes to a CET Drawing. A drawing contains spaces, snappers, and papers. Other elements in the drawing are the calculation (prices and article views), part tags and categories information. The entire drawing is saved as a single entity in a drawing file (.cmdrw).

In the Collaboration working model, users create, connect to and work on a Collaboration Project. Instead of a single storage entity, a CET Drawing is saved as a set of specialized project files which are synchronized online. These files would need to be loaded to a local workspace to allow a user to work on them. Any changes to these files can then be submitted to the cloud.

As Collaboration presents a multi-user working environment, the conflict management approach taken is to make each project file editable by only one user at a time. Each user may obtain an edit access (edit lock) of a project file, and other users will not be able to modify the contents until lock is released.

Drawing Space in Collaboration

The snappers on main drawing space are divided into Sections.

Each Section is a project file containing information of snappers and their positions in the drawing space. Each snapper on the main space exclusively belongs to one Section.

Alternatives in Collaboration

In a Collaboration project, the Alternatives feature is not supported. Users will not be allowed to create Alternatives. There will be only a single drawing space in the World. Users may instead duplicate a section to create variations.

Blocks in Collaboration

Unlike the main drawing Space, the Block Space sub snappers are not divided into different sections. A BlockSpace will be part of one Section, or a Shared Block (project file). The block’s owners (BlockSnapper) in the drawing’s main space may belong to different sections than with normal snappers.

The example above shows that the block created from both Chair and Square tables now only belong in the Chair Section.

Papers

Papers (instances of PaperSpace) are grouped, where each Paper Group (project file) may contain one or more PaperSpace instances.

Scenarios

Scenarios hold a collection of project files. Loading a Scenario will automatically load its project files too. A project file can be part of multiple Scenarios at a time. Preset calculations can exist only as part of a Scenario.