Working in OpenRoads Designer is pretty awesome. It's a really smart, well-designed, extensible system. BIM and Digital Twin ready.
Administering it is its dark underbelly. It's extraordinarily complex. The documentation is scattered. Weird "tricks" are required.
If your client has a Workspace, use it! You will find gaps.
- Get help!
If your client does not have a Workspace, try not to develop your own. Try to use a fully-developed workspace from somewhere else. A DOT's. The Bentley Training Workspace.
- Get help!
The architecture is designed to be flexible without special customization - IF you are a configuration expert. It's hyper-complicated, and working it is slow. Add in ProjectWise, and it's even more complex.
Instead of a text based-configuration file system, like the .ini's and .xin's of yore (they were easy to build tools for), it's "in the dgn" and multiple levels deep.
I remember in 1999, pushing San Diego's support team to use the "Five-level System" to manage the the configuration of multiple departments across the City. Many of the CAD Managers felt that five level was four levels too many. While it was designed for "Distributed Simplicity" it was still "too complicated".
Twenty-five+years later, OpenRoads configuration is by far the hardest part of the platform.
- It's the most complicated scope of anything I've seen in 35 years of using Civil software (three vendors). By far.
- It's time-consuming. You're opening and closing dgn files one at a time. It's SLOW.
- It's really specialized and non-intuitve. If you don't do something frequently, you have to re-learn it.
- It's never been fun and it's a whole lot less fun now.
-
Take care of your staff.
A primary reason it has taken many DOTs many years to develop a working workspace is that they follows Bentley's model. Bentley's workspace development was driven by the demo jocks (God bless them). Photo-realistic integrated 3D shop drawing -precision made excellent demonstrations. And because Bentley modeled seven hundred drainage inlets and endwalls, EVERYBODY thought they had to model EVERY SINGLE STRUCTURE in their spec book. They'll never get those years back.
What they needed to do was model a representative subset that covered the needs of the design, quantity and quality (spatial class detection), and contract needs. Being able to see through the inlets curved grates, was cool, but it was never necessary. It still isn't.
Keep it as Simple as Possible. Develop only the minimum for what your client needs. Fatten for the future later when you're rolling.
Contact me. Let's talk. I can help.