BCF Live - teething problems

Alex Plenty

Hi All,

I just wanted to document some of the teething problems we’ve experienced when using the BCF live connector, please let me know if you know of any work-arounds!

-Duplicate comments: When switching from “old fashioned” way of exporting BCF files and importing to BIM Track to BCF Live Connector, some of the comments that have been added to BIM Track do not appear in BCF Live Connector tab in Solibri. This leads to adding the comments on BCF Live Connector manually and once that is done, BIM Track contains duplicate comments - one from previous “old fashioned” workflow and another is added after switching to BCF Live feature.

-Working with Multiple SMCs: When working on a complex project that involves several buildings, we tend to have separate SMC files for each building, but we store all BCF presentations under one project on BIM Track and there were no issues with this pre BCF live as we could sync update presentations. We have an issues when updating that project on BIM Track from different Solibri files. By this, I mean that if we sync one project’s building with BIM Track, we will automatically upload all the issues into Solibri file and we will need to upload that for every project’s building. This may lead to chaos/duplication of comments/constant issue re-assignment etc.

-Grouping issues: On larger projects group presentations/raise issues by the date of the design team meeting or we use attributes against the issues which sit outside of the BCF schema such as workpackages, this is key as most design programs are aligned this way. We are now unable to sync update these issues with the only alternative (I know of) being to download a bcf and update from a bcf but these BCF files are not always easy to filter to exactly the issues within the presentation.

Hopefully workarounds are known, please let us know!

-Alex (on behalf of Ridge Digital Engineering team)

tonigyllenberg

@Alex-Plenty I have transferred this issue over to our tech talks section.

In case you have not yet seen it, there is a page here with some basics about BCF Live Connector.

To answer your questions:

Duplicate comments: With BCF Live, Solibri acts as a client, displaying the same information as is available on the server. Anything done on the server, which saves a modification date, will be returned to Solibri automatically. It sounds to me that there may possibly be an issue with the modification date (as there was previously an issue with another issue management server). Could you describe, in detail, what kind of issue you are adding these comments to? Is it an Active issue, is there something specific about it? Can it be reproduced with ANY issue in the server?

Working with multiple SMCs: This is indeed a little more tricky, especially if there are local Solibri issues in each SMC file. I will have some testing done this week regarding this point.

Grouping issues: I’m not entirely sure I understand the problem. Is the issue about not being able to use non-bcf compliant fields or attributes with BCF Live? If that is the case, then unfortunately (or fortunately) we do intend to continue supporting the BCF-API standard, and do not want to deviate from that. We aim to provide our users with a standard-compliant solution, and hope that other vendors continue to do the same.

Kind regards,
Toni on behalf of the Solibri team

chris

Duplicate

Always save the file after sync with BCF Live. The issue didn’t occure after this.

Alex Plenty

@tonigyllenberg Thank you for your reply.

Working with multiple SMCs: Thank you for looking into this.

Grouping issues: I appreciate the wider goal is that everything should be aligned to the BCF schema and we should be looking to get the schema expanded rather than going off-piste.

However, when IFC models are opened in Solibri with rogue properties and sets outside of the schema Solibri (rightly or wrongly) still shows them.

Previously, when we had the ability to update presentations, we could have the best of both worlds where what was in Solibri was compliant to the BCF schema but within BIMTrack we could include extra metadata to the issues to group them. Some of the projects we are working on, even after you’ve filtered them using all of the relevant BCF attributes (status, stage, priority, etc) we still end up with hundreds of issues within the BCF Live View which just isn’t practical to sift through in a meeting. When we filter issues we want to see all of the issues with incoming services or upstands, very specific things.

Some suggested solutions:

The ability to sync update issues by presentations is added back in.
BCF Live picks up non BCF attributes in italics much like Solibri picks up non IFC Schema property sets.
The BCF live view is able to filter for issues using what is present within the selection basket or sectioning (much like how you can ‘Check Selected’ through the Checking tool)

ZhandosTelman

@tonigyllenberg Hi Toni, thank you for your comments.

When I first used BCF Live on a project, I already created a presentation for a workshop and wanted to push that into BIM Track, so I synchronised Solibri with BIM Track and then used “Import Issues” - “Selected Issues” and selected the prepared presentation in BCF Live tab.
When the presentation was imported, I was not able to see any comments I left under each slide, therefore I had to type them back again. Once that has been done I was left with two similar comments under each slide, please see the screenshot attached:

I believe this issue can only occur if this is the first time you synchronise your SMC with BIM Track and you have already prepared a presentation for a workshop.

Many thanks,

Zhandos Telman