Bentley Structural Modeller > Introduction

Each project using CADtools Structural requires some files of the Bentley Structural dataset to be copied into the project area, please refer to the CADtools Project Configuration manual for more details. Note also that this procedure has changed for the Microstation XM compatible releases of CADtools.

One of these files is the Structural Shapes XML file which controls the structural section sizes that are available. The XML file provided as part of the project setup is empty so that project modellers populate the file with the section sizes appropriate for that project, rather than dealing with a long list of all the possible section sizes. See Section 8.1 for more information. Bentley Structural allows you to load different Structural shapes files during the same session, and indeed whilst in the same drawing. To avoid problems with drawing resymbolisation and quantity reporting, you should NOT do this, and stick to the single project Structural Shapes file. Note: The XM releases can place Castellated beams, so long as they are read from a STAAD section file (.MDB file). Testing of the use of the Staad MDB file and Structural Shapes XML file simultaneously has not been done, for further information contact [email protected]

Bentley Structural includes a ‘Configuration’ check that runs each time Structural is started. With the release of CADtools Structural for XM (CADtools 2.1 release) we have worked on removing any spurious configuration errors, so the errors produced by this tool should be considered real errors worth investigating. There may be some warnings produced by the tool (yellow exclamation mark), but no serious errors (red crosses).

_img127

Typical output of the ‘Triforma Configuration Check’ tool, indicating no serious errors, but some typical minor warnings.

The ‘duplicate section name’ error shown above may be encountered when using ‘dummy headers’ in the Structural Shapes file, where those dummy headers have the same name. Where a duplicate section name is found, and the name refers to a real size, the shapes file should be edited to remove the duplicate.

Direct link to this topic:

Critical project files.