Finally got my layer management system to actually work

I was drowning in a 200+ layer drawing for a commercial HVAC retrofit. My old method of just naming layers 'mech-1', 'mech-2' was a mess. Last week, I forced myself to use a prefix system: M-DUCT for mechanical ductwork, M-EQIP for equipment, P-PIPE for plumbing. It took an hour to rename everything, but now isolating systems for the electricians is a 30-second job. Has anyone else found a naming trick that finally clicked for them?

4 comments

4 Comments

henry1505d ago

Yeah the hyphen thing is exactly why I switched to underscores years ago too. @abbyf79 hit it perfectly about search functions treating hyphens as spaces - that killed me on a job where I had "HW-SUPPLY" for hot water supply and the search split it into "HW" and "SUPPLY" when I tried to batch rename. Now I do M_DUCT, P_PIPE, E_LIGHT and it plays nice with everything. Also helps that sorting by layer name puts all my mechanical stuff together without the dash messing up the alphabetical order.

emma_lee222mo ago

Your M-DUCT prefix is good but ditch the dash. The underscore in M_DUCT works better with most layer filter commands. I had to redo a 150 layer set because the dash broke my auto-sorting script. Stick to letters, numbers, and underscores for clean data.

margaretr762mo ago

My old Revit template had hyphens in every family name. After a filter command failed on a hospital project, I switched to underscores completely. It just works better with the software we use.

abbyf792mo ago

Check how your naming works with the project's search function too. Some systems treat a hyphen as a space and split the term, which kills find and replace. That's another reason to keep it simple with underscores.