InfraWorks Home: Working with tiles

- They say there’s no place like home, and InfraWorks Home is where you’ll start each InfraWorks 360 session. Let’s take a look at one of the most important parts of InfraWorks Home: the tiles that represent your models. The tiles are probably the first thing you’ll notice when you launch InfraWorks 360 for the first time and see this InfraWorks Home state. Each tile represents a model, and that model can be stored locally or in the cloud. Or both, as I’ll explain in just a moment. In fact this first model here is stored in both places, and the way that I know that is by this icon in the lower right corner.

It’s an icon that represents a connection, and that connection is the one between the locally stored model and the cloud model. It also means that I can open this model, make a change, and have the ability to sync that change up to the cloud version so that maybe someone I’m collaborating with can download a fresh copy of the model to their local version and work with the changes that I’ve made. Some other things you’ll notice about this tile: I’ve got an ‘Open,’ ‘Duplicate,’ and ‘Delete’ icon here.

I see information about the name of the project, when it was last modified, the name of the group that it resides in, and the person who owns that group or administers that group. Just to the right of that is a model that’s stored only in the cloud. I can tell because the icon is different. It looks like a cloud. I see information on the size of the model, but I don’t see a location, because it’s not stored locally. I only have one icon on the left side, and that’s the ability to download the model.

And if I were to click that I would start the download process by choosing a location for the local copy and clicking ‘Download.’ There’s another type of model that I want to show you, but in order to show you that I’m going to have to use my filters, and I’ll explain those in just a second. I’ll switch this to ‘Local.’ And I’ll switch this to ‘Show all groups.’ And you can see that I’ve got a model here called ‘Lynda Heights 2.’ The way that I created this model is I downloaded ‘Lynda Heights’ and I duplicated it. So the duplicated copy is not associated with any cloud version.

So you’ll notice that the icon in the lower right corner is different. It looks like a house, and that icon means that this model is only a local model. You can see the path, you can see the size of the model. A lot of the same information. The name of the model and who saved it last. But you won’t see group information there, because it doesn’t reside in a group. And I can ‘Open, Duplicate,’ and ‘Delete’ that model. Now, if I want this model to reside in a group I can open it and publish it to a group and then this symbol will change to this type of symbol.

So let’s talk about that filtering function that I used just a second ago. The way it works is I click the white triangle next to ‘My Models,’ and I’ve got kind of two main categories or ways to filter what I see. I can filter it based on whether it’s ‘Local,’ or ‘Cloud,’ or ‘Recently Used.’ Of course, ‘Show all’ just means show everything, don’t filter at all. Or I can go over here to the right and I can filter based on group name. So I’ve got a whole bunch of groups here that I’ve been invited to.

But if I only want to see models that belong to a certain group, I can click the little circle next to the group and it will only show me what’s in that group. I can even filter further by using one of the other criteria over here, and say only show me local copies that are in this group, or I could say show me objects that are in multiple groups. So you can use any combination of these filters to control what you see on InfraWorks Home.

So the next thing I’ll show you is another way to filter which you may not think of as filtering, but it actually is. And that’s this search field right here. Before I use it I’m gonna come over here and clear the current set of filters by clicking the “x” next to ‘Filter Active.’ And then I’ll type in a search term, and I’ll just use the word “Lynda” here. And it’s gonna pick up on model names, group names, owner names, wherever it finds the word “Lynda” and it’s actually going to filter the tiles that I see on InfraWorks Home based on that search criteria.

So I’ll scroll down and I see all models that have the word “Lynda” either in the name or in the group name. One thing to be careful of is that you can combine what your search term is here with other filters. So if you get too specific you may end up creating a combination of filters that yields no results. Now I haven’t done that here, but I have whittled it down to one, so be careful that you don’t over-filter and end up with nothing. So you can clear the search filter, you can clear this filter, and get whatever you need.

So that takes care of understanding the tiles that you’ll find on InfraWorks Home. Hopefully what you’ve learned here will make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for and get to work.