Merging a network

- In the previous video, you learned how to merge networks to combine them into one. What if you want to do the opposite? Well, that's called splitting a network and here's how it's done. If you went through the previous video, you know that we took this pipe, which was previously connected to this endwall and we reattached it over to this inlet. Before doing that, however, we merged the road network and the parking network together to make them function as one individual network.

Well, maybe we've decided that's not such a good idea so we want to go back to the way we were before. We want to break this into two separate networks. Well, that's done through the split network command. I'm going to pick some pipes and structures, I'm going to launch the split network command and then it's going to take those objects and either put them in another network or create a new network from them. So, the important first step is to pick all of the things that i want to be in that separate network so if you're splitting a network into two, and one of the resulting networks is much smaller than the other, you're going to want to work with that one.

So, in this case, that's going to be my parking lot network. So I have to methodically select all of the pipes and structures that are part of that network, and that's not too bad because there aren't many of them in this case, and then all I need to do is go to the contextual ribbon tab and say split network, and I've already selected my objects. If I had launched the command first, it would now prompt me to select the objects, I could do that, too. So I have two options to pick from.

I can create a new pipe network out of the objects that I've selected, or I can kind of merge them into a network that already exists in the drawing. I want to, in this case, create my own new individual network out of what I've selected. So I'll click create new pipe network. And when I do that, because I'm creating a new network, I have to give it a name. I'll just use the old name we used before, Storm1, and I'll choose the storm sewer parts list, surface name will be EG and FG, these are all the same choices that we made when we first created the network, I'll go right in and chose my Storm1 alignment, which is still there from before.

Of course, if I had done something different, gone down a different path, I may not have that alignment and I'm not going to do any labeling at this point. So none right now is the right choice for those options. I'll click OK and again, in the drawing visually it doesn't appear that anything has happened, but topologically, if I go into Prospector, we'll see that there are now two separate networks, and I'll bring up Toolspace real quick, Prospector, go to pipe networks, and now we see Storm1 and Storm Road are separate.

You may have noticed, also, another little visual cue, this pipe, even though the end of the pipe is occupying the same space as the structure, it doesn't appear that they are connected, it's not cleaned up, and that's because they can't be. They're in two different networks. So I now I can put things back the way they were before. I'll click the end of this pipe, place it near this endwall and watch for the gliff, make sure I can see that because when I can see the gliff and I click, it connects the pipe to the structure.

So now I've undone what I did in the previous video. I've separated these back out into two separate networks and I've reconnected the pipe to where it was before.