
	Applies To

	Product(s):	gINT Logs, gINT Professional, gINT Professional Plus
	Version(s):	8.x
	Environment:	N\A
	Area:	Symbol Design
	Subarea:	N\A
	Original Author:	Kathleen Holcomb, Bentley Technical Support Group

Symbol Design Tutorial Part 6: Library Maintenance Options for Symbols and Colors

All symbols and colors are library objects in the current library, and can be copied, edited, and manipulated, with two exceptions:

Colors can be copied between and deleted from libraries, but cannot be user-created.
Line types are internal to gINT, and cannot be added, deleted, copied or modified.

To copy symbols or colors between libraries, use UTILITIES Lib Merge/Copy, and select the appropriate category or categories in the Available Source Tables list, such as ‘Colors’, ‘Material Composite Symbols’, or ‘Tiles’. Be careful to avoid overwriting symbols of the same name in the source and destination, unless that is what you really want to do. The Always Query or Query on Overwrite options are recommended.

Recommendations for Modifying Symbols

Symbol deletion from a library is never a good idea unless you are certain of the origin of the symbol and that it is not referenced in reports, user system data items, or other symbols elsewhere in the library. (When you do need to delete, open the symbol in SYMBOL DESIGN and choose File Delete Current Page).

Similarly, it is not a good idea to directly modify a symbol in (or obtained from) your standard library, unless you want your changes to appear for this symbol everywhere it is used. Also, by altering a standard symbol you run the risk of overwriting your changed version with the original version when you merge symbols between libraries. A better approach when you want a changed version of a symbol is to copy the original symbol to a new name (File Copy Page) prior to modifying the copy. This way you can always distinguish the new symbol from the original, you do not risk accidental overwrites during library merges, and you know exactly where the new symbol is used in reports and elsewhere.

When you want to make the changed symbol more apparent to users than the original symbol in selection lists in INPUT, you can caption the original symbol. This keeps references to the original intact in reports and elsewhere, but enables you to make it less obvious in selection lists. For example, you can caption the original ‘CLS’ material symbol as ‘zzz CLS STANDARD’, thereby moving it to the end of selection lists. You can also caption both the new and original symbols to effectively replace the original in selection lists (so that the old name now selects the new symbol), as in the following:

Which Symbol	Name Property	Caption Property
original	CLS	zzz CLS STANDARD
changed	CLS MY_COMPANY	CLS

After these captions are in place, the selection lists will show the following:

.
.
CLS
.
.
.
zzz CLS STANDARD

where ‘CLS’ in the list refers to the changed symbol, and ‘zzz CLS STANDARD’ refers to the original. This works, even though the Caption of the changed symbol appears to conflict with the Name of the original, because a caption always takes preference over a name in selection lists. Note, however, that captions only influence the display of symbols in INPUT. In REPORT DESIGN, SYMBOL DESIGN, User System Data, and so on, you must always refer to the Name, not the Caption, to reference a symbol.

Copying Symbols between Applications

The File Copy Page option within a particular SYMBOL DESIGN application (secondary tab bar tab) only copies within that application. That is, you cannot use it to copy symbols from one tab to another.

You can copy composite symbols between the Material, Sampler, Well and General applications using the File Merge option. For example, if there is a Sampler symbol that you wish to copy to the Material application, click the Material tab and select File Merge. You see the COMPOSITE SYMBOL MERGE dialog box.

You specify the source application in the Source Type list (you’d choose ‘Sampler Graphics’ in the example), and then select the desired symbol or symbols using the Symbol(s) to Merge field. To avoid breaking any references to the source symbols from reports and elsewhere, you are advised to leave Delete Original(s) unchecked. You can rename any copied symbols in the destination application without harm.

Other SYMBOL DESIGN applications do not have a Merge option. However, you can copy drawing entities from a symbol in one application to a symbol in another provided both are in line-graphics based applications, that is, where symbols are created and modified using gIDraw. This includes Tiles, Discrete Graphics, and Data Markers. So, for example, if you wanted to use the ‘BIO_HAZARD’ discrete graphic as a tile, you would create a blank symbol for it in the destination application (Tiles), open the original in Discrete Graphics, select all the entities (Modify Select Entities), copy them to the buffer, then paste them in the new tile. Note that you will typically need to scale the symbol up or down in size when copying between these applications, using Modify Scale Multiply or similar, and may also need to move the graphic to a different location within the new symbol.

Copying Data Markers to User-Friendly Names

You will notice in SYMBOL DESIGN Data Markers in your library, the markers used in graphs and site maps have names such as ‘1’, ‘4’, ‘17’ and ‘82’, which are not very user-friendly. This has been done for deployment of gINT in non-English languages. However, if there are particular data marker symbols you use in your own reports or expressions, you should copy the symbols to identical versions with user-friendly names. For example, if you copy the marker ‘3’ to one called ‘BH_MARKER’, marker ‘16’ to ‘TP_MARKER’, marker ’17’ to ‘CPT_MARKER’, and ‘1’ to ‘DEFAULT_MARKER’, you could write the following site map PointID marker expression:

<<Switch(<<Like(<<POINT.PointID>>,"B-*")>>,3,_
                  <<Like(<<POINT.PointID>>,"TP*")>>,16,_
                  <<Like(<<POINT.PointID>>,"CPT*")>>,17,_
                 True,1 _
)>>

as this one instead:

<<Switch(<<Like(<<POINT.PointID>>,"B-*")>>,BH_MARKER,_
         <<Like(<<POINT.PointID>>,"TP*")>>,TP_MARKER,_
         <<Like(<<POINT.PointID>>,"CPT*")>>,CPT_MARKER,_
         True,DEFAULT_MARKER _
)>>

Captioning will not work in this circumstance, because you’re trying to provide user-friendly names to persons doing report design and similar development work, rather than to end users. The actual name of the symbol, not a caption, is what is referenced by a report or expression. Similarly, it is not advisable to rename the original symbol, because it may already be in use by an existing report or expression. For these reasons, you should copy, not caption or rename, frequently used data markers, then give the copies user-friendly names.