Unique identifier in Navisworks freedom?

[jan]

Hi,

My first post here,,,

I am working on the field, using NavisWorks Freedom (2014) in a large-huge project. We ned to extract a unique identifier for some objects.

There will at some time be a custom unique tag identifier for components in the system. However this seems to drag on and will probably not be available for a year, and we need it now. So a custom field is out of question for now. The component count for the project is in the multi-millions.

Generally, skipping exotic special cases:

- Is the Handle property all-time unique for a component in a project?

- Is the Handle property unique for a component, at least at a certain point in time?

- Is the Handle property unique for a component in a, as long as no component is deleted, re-enterd to the system?

- Or Is there another (default) unique identifier we can use?

Thanks

[dgorsman]

That is entirely dependant on the model - I'll use AutoCAD as an example.  Every object in AutoCAD has a handle, and that handle is unique to that object in that file.  Another file may have the same handle, but refer to a completely different object.  If that object is deleted, and another put in its place it will have a different handle.  This is true even if the object is exactly the same as the erased object.  For some custom objects, the third-party software will modify the object by erasing the original and constructing a new one using the old information.  In short, it can be *very* difficult to uniquely track objects via handles.

Other software such as Revit will include a separate, specific unique ID for just this purpose.

[jan]

So: the Handle property unique for a file only at a certain point in time only?

What about another property? GUID? (However it seems it does not allow copy / paste :-|)