Very often, two or more documents may be related to each other. The documents may or may not reside in the same folder. These relationships may be of several kinds. One kind of relationship is content-related. This relationship is characterized by the content of the related documents and is established by the applications used to create the documents. Examples of content-related documents are:
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AutoCAD X-Refs — X-Refs are drawings that either reference other drawings or are themselves referenced by other drawings. This applies to all derivations of AutoCAD, including Architectural and Mechanical Desktop products.
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AutoCAD sheet sets — Sheet sets are drawing layouts that are printed together as sets.
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Autodesk Inventor assemblies, parts, and drawings — Autodesk Inventor assembly models incorporate part models, and Autodesk Inventor drawings incorporate views of assembly or part models.
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SolidWorks assemblies, parts, and drawings — Same as for Autodesk Inventor.
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MicroStation model references — MicroStation model references relate drawings to other models or layout views.
A second kind of relationship is revision-related. This relationship is characterized by the revisions of related documents and is established by Meridian when the revisions or versions are created. Examples of revision-related documents are:
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Derived documents — A new document is derived from an existing document.
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Replacement documents — A new document is created that replaces an existing document.
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Master documents and project copies — One or more copies of a master document are created for concurrent editing in different projects.
A third kind of relationship is business-related. This relationship is characterized by the business processes that use the related documents and must be established by the users of the documents. Examples of business-related documents are:
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Drawings and a bill of materials or sheet schedule.
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Drawings and specifications, installation and operations manuals, or design calculations.
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Project plans, schedules, and meeting minutes.
In order to represent these relationships in a Meridian vault, Meridian uses links called references. A reference is a link from one document to another that represents a specific relationship. A document may have any number of references to another document, called outgoing references. Conversely, a document may be referenced by any number of other documents, called incoming references. Like many other things in Meridian, references are created from templates called reference types. References between documents are created in the Meridian client applications by users as described in the Accruent Meridian Enterprise User's Guide. Meridian can automatically create references for the first two kinds of relationships. The third kind of relationship requires custom references that are created in Configurator.
Creating and editing custom reference types are described in the following topic.
