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Axiom releases RuleManager for V8.
By Eiren Smith, Vice President for
Technology
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CLEARWATER, FLORIDA, USA —
As the Product Manager for Axiom's quality assurance tools
SpecChecker, SpecMonitor and RuleManager, customers
regularly ask me what's new. The answer is always "Plenty!"
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| RuleManager for V8 can extract a set of CAD standards
to be used with Axiom’s quality assurance tools from
an existing design file quickly and automatically. |
The latest news about Axiom's quality assurance tools is
the release of the first version of RuleManager for
the MicroStation V8 family, including MicroStation V8 2004
Edition. Why is this a momentous occasion? Now, V8 users will
be able to take full advantage of the tools that ensure automatic
adherence to "sometimes-not-easy-to-remember" CAD
standards and decrease proofreading time to almost zero. This
will make clients happy, as their files will be totally on-standard.
This will make CAD managers happy, as it will increase output
and production and save time. Most importantly, it will make
upper management happy to see project costs decrease.
I'm going to spend a little time describing RuleManager's
role in Axiom's V8 family of quality assurance tools, which
includes SpecChecker, SpecMonitor and, now,
RuleManager.
Understanding RuleManager
To understand RuleManager, a basic knowledge of SpecChecker
is necessary. SpecChecker is Axiom's wildly popular
tool for automatically checking, reporting and correcting
CAD standards. SpecChecker's business is detecting
violations of CAD standards. SpecChecker can be run
by every user on the floor, by CAD standards specialists and
by project managers. Anyone can run SpecChecker to
check a design file for compliance with CAD standards.
But before SpecChecker can enforce CAD standards,
it has to know what those CAD standards are. In order to be
automatically enforced, CAD standards — which could be
written in any number of styles and file formats - must be
reduced to a common, uniform style and file format. For SpecChecker,
such files are called "rules files." Within each
rules file there are multiple "rules." Each rule
contains the element criteria for what is deemed "on-standard"
for a kind of element.
Rules and rules files are where RuleManager comes
in. RuleManager's purpose is to create and manage MicroStation
quality assurance rules files. These rules files are then
used by SpecChecker or SpecMonitor (which differs
from SpecChecker in that it enforces CAD standards
as designers place elements) to automatically enforce CAD
standards.
Creating rules with RuleManager
RuleManager has two ways of creating rules. Users can
create them interactively using RuleManager's wizard-style
interface, which provides them with context-sensitive lists
of MicroStation element types, properties, levels and other
element characteristics. RuleManager can also create
rules automatically by analyzing one or more existing design
files containing on-standard elements. This analysis, which
takes only seconds on most design files, results in rules
files that are ready for production, with a rule for each
set of unique element criteria found in that file. RuleManager
also provides the user with options regarding what element
criteria to consider when automatically generating those rules.
For example, if your standards allow for the use of any element
type but are very strict about level usage, you might want
to tell RuleManager that you want it to ignore element
types but consider the level of each element in the files
being analyzed.
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| Rule Generation Options box |
SpecChecker and SpecMonitor do the checking.
RuleManager tells them what your standards are.
RuleManager is a separate tool for two reasons. One,
it helps write rules for use with both SpecChecker and SpecMonitor.
Two, it is not necessarily a tool that you want to provide
to all your SpecChecker and SpecMonitor users. It serves best
as an administrator-only tool.
V8-only Features
RuleManager for V8 includes enhancements that take
advantage of technology unique to MicroStation V8. For example,
it has an option to generate rules files only from the models
you specify. For example, perhaps you only want RuleManager
for V8 to consider the active model when analyzing design
files, or perhaps you want it to ignore sheet models. It can
do all that and more.
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| Element Type and Level checkboxes |
RuleManager for V8 also has rich support for V8's
ByLevel symbology in its automatic design file analysis and
rule generation. If an element, for example, has ByLevel color,
RuleManager can either treat that element's color as
"ByLevel" or it can automatically determine what
the color is for the level the element is placed on and make
the rules file accordingly. Which way it treats ByLevel attributes
is user definable.
Summary
RuleManager has been helping MicroStation V7 users
since 1999. It has been a valuable tool in streamlining the
enforcement of CAD standards at hundreds of MicroStation shops
worldwide. Now, RuleManager for V8 is here to help
the V8 generation.
Call now!
For more information on Axiom's quality assurance tools, contact
an Axiom MicroStation Consultant today! Call 727-442-7774
extension 9062 or e-mail 9062@axiomint.com.
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