Reference

The Workspace

The workspace is where you read the record. Module 03 covers the tools you draw with; this page covers the room they are in — how documents get on screen, how they stay there, and what happens when you send someone a link to one.

The shell

One shell, not a page per sheet

Opening a different sheet does not load a different page. The workspace mounts once per project and swaps what is focused inside it, so zoom, selection, open panes and the markup you have in progress all survive moving between sheets. That is also why the project switcher lives inside the workspace: switching jobs is the one thing that does rebuild it.

Open the LODE on the project dashboard is the front door. It opens the current Field Set at its first sheet. The persistent index down the side moves you within whatever is focused.

The working set

The working set and its tabs

The strip across the top is the working set — every document you have open, in order. Entries are labelled for what they are (Field Set, Specifications, a filename), never by the sheet you happen to be on; the header shows your position within the entry.

Tabs drag. Nineteen backup files arrive in the order you opened them, which is rarely the order you read them in, and this strip is the only place that order is visible.

Reordering is presentation only. Panes address entries by identity, so a dragged tab moves the tab and nothing else — nothing refocuses, no position is lost.

The order persists with the session, so the set you arranged is the set you come back to.

Opening more

Opening more — The LODE

The LODE is the overlay that opens documents, on its own toolbar button (⌥[). It slides over the viewer and closes on selection, click-away or Escape. It is deliberately not the same control as the index toggle: the index moves you within what is focused, The LODE opens something else.

It carries one consolidated view: a jump row for the Field Set, the same for Specifications, then Recent files — a search box, the ten most-recently-touched files, View all files for the full browser, and New. The project switcher sits at the top of it.

Panes

Panes and compare

A pane is a viewport onto the working set, and there can be more than one. Two panes side by side is how you read a revision against the sheet it supersedes, or a detail against the plan it is called out on. Compare puts a sheet against its own earlier revision with the diff overlay on, so what moved is visible rather than remembered.

Panes are views, not copies

Both panes read the same working set. Closing a pane closes the view, not the document.

Links

What a workspace link carries

The URL names the focused document: /projects/<project>/workspace?doc=sheet:A201. Paste that to a teammate and they land on A201 of the current set, at its last position, with their own working set intact. Add &beside=sheet:A301 and the second sheet opens in a pane beside it — that is how a citation on an RFI lands on the sheet with its sketch already alongside.

A link is not a share

A workspace URL only works for someone who already has access to the project. To hand a document to somebody outside the firm, mint a share link — module 11, Sharing & Guests.

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