We’ve moved several types of user-defined datums to a central location in the Catalog Explorer. This makes it easier to find, create, and manage datums, and prevents datums from being conditionally disabled which historically caused issues with broken links.

This work enables future improvements like user defined origin-relative datums that can be shared by multiple entity types.

New datums can be created within the explorer menu via the + icon. Users must specify the type of datum they want to create.

Once created, datums will automatically be nested with other datums of the same type. Similar type datums can be grouped together for organization.

If selected, individual datums or datum groups will expose an inspector panel on the right side of the canvas. When inspecting the group, users can search, filter, sort and add new datums. Individual datums can flyout via the gear icon for quick browsing.

Datums, and Datum groups can be doc ref’d. Users cannot add local content to a doc ref’d group, nor can they delete individual doc ref’d entities within a doc ref’d group.

Users can doc ref in individual entities whether they are within groups in the CDM file or not.

Now, if you doc reference a Facade Entity that references a User-defined Datum, that Datum will also automatically be selected and pulled into your local file too.

Users can also see individual Datum Usages, via the Usages tab in the Inspector, or from right clicking the datum in the Explorer. From there, there’s a convenient link that takes you to the every usage of that particular datum.

For existing homes, Facade, Foundation and Level datums were moved from their current location in Datum Settings and Levels, to the new Datum Catalog section of the explorer.

Datums included in a Datums Settings object were migrated to a group with the same name. Level datums were likewise moved to a group of datums that share the original level name.

New Homes will start with Built-in datums in a unique group.