View Groups Window
Used to manipulate view groups and view windows and to navigate between models that have been active at some point during the current design session.
A view group is a named collection of eight view windows that allows you to set up your desktop to display your preferences, including number of open view windows, window size, and view orientation. Most commonly, each view group is associated with a model, making it easy to access and navigate through different models in the active DGN file, via the View Group drop-down menu.
You can also associate different models to the same view group by creating multi-model view groups. Multi-model view groups allow you to view more than one model or saved view from the same DGN file in separate views. You can create a view group that displays from one to eight different models.
Where, during a design session, you activate models in more than one DGN file, you can also use the View Groups window to easily navigate the current session's model history in multiple files. That is, you can switch between models you have activated, regardless of the files in which those models reside.
When navigating between models, key combinations control the way that the model is opened. This applies whether you use the left/right arrows, or if you select the model from the drop-down lists. That is, pressing the <Shift> or <Alt> keys, as you select the model, affects the configuration of the views in that model. The previous/next/selected model opens as follows:
- No key combination — opens the selected model with the views as they were left in the current session.
- <Shift> key — opens the selected model with the views as they were the last time that File > Save Settings was chosen.
- <Alt> key — opens the selected model with the views as they are in the current model.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Previous Model | Lets you access the previous model in the session history by clicking the left arrow. Alternatively, you can click the down arrow and select a previously accessed model from a drop-down list. |
| Next Model | Lets you access the next model in the session history by clicking the right arrow. Alternatively, you can click the down arrow and select the next model from a drop-down list. |
| All Models Visited | Clicking the down arrow displays a drop-down list of all models accessed, from which you can select a model to open. |
| View Group | Displays the name of the view group as well as the model with which it is associated, and allows you select a different view group. |
| Manage View Groups | Opens the Manage View Groups dialog, which is used to create, edit and delete view groups. |
| View Toggles | Click the numbered buttons to open or close individual view windows (equivalent to choosing the numbered items in the View Groups ribbon group). |
