Best Practices for View Frame Groups. Where do you store them?

[BrianBenton]

We are starting to uise View Frame Groups in our Civil3D projects (Civil3D 2015) for land development design; mainly residential.

We have a base file with regular AutoCAD linework. We have a source file that has our alignements, surfaces, and profiles. Then we have a third source file that has our pipe networks in them.

A View Frame Group needs an alignement to be created so our first thought was to create them in our source file that has the alignements. But then when we create the plan and profile sheet files, the sheet creation wizard only xref's the file that the view frame groups are in. We would then have to go and manually xref the base files into each P&P sheet, which we feel defeats the purpose of using VFG.

We came up with these solutions:

1. Create the VFG in the base file with the main linework forcing Civil3D to xref that base file into each P&P.

2. Manually xref the base file(s) into each P&P sheet. (Not a fan of this solution, but it's not the end of the world either.)

3. Create the VFG in it's own seperate source file, xref the base files we need into this source file as attachements forcing the VFG and all base files into the P&P sheet.

We are discussing which will work best for us and are looking for suggestions and recomendations from other users. What works for you? What issues arrise?

Thank you for your time on this.

[jmayo-EE · Accepted solution]

I prefer #3.

[Joe-Bouza · Accepted solution]

I believe you may have overlooked something. The Template file you call upon for creating sheets can have all your xref already attached.

[BrianBenton]

Not only did I overlook that option I never even thought of doing that! Great idea. Thank you.

[BrianBenton]

Thanks for the feedback John.

[Joe-Bouza]

And now it doesn't matter where the vframes are