EDA

EDA is a drawing archive. An archive is a database that holds references to drawings, attributes and linked data. EDA collects and organizes drawings. EDA can contain AutoCAD drawings, scanned documents, digital photos or any kind of imagery and more. EDA lists drawings using filters from stored rules to simplify locating and using drawings. EDA contains an embedded viewer that can display any supported vector and raster files. Users can output selected drawings to any installed printer/plotter.

EDA 3 is CSoft's next generation archiving front-end application. It inherits all the good features from EDA 2, such as dual data format support, links between image and text, easy customizable forms, and open architecture. EDA 3 spreads its functionality to multipage documents as well as multi-user support. EDA 3 can be connected to more types of databases, such as MS Access, MSDE, MS SQL and Oracle. EDA utilizes a "hybrid drawing database" approach, effectively working with raster images, vector drawings and text data. It can contain image-referenced fields with text comments.

Using EDA

After a few simple steps you will have your drawing files organized:

• First you select or define an archive template
• Then you create a drawing archive using this template
• Now import your drawings into the archive.

Daily management of drawings will finally be efficient.

Archive Templates

EDA keeps everything simple supplying the user with a set of predefined archive templates. A template is a prepared archive structure definition, suitable for specific application e.g. mechanical, architectural and others. Archives created with the same template have the same basic structure. User can create, use and share templates.

Importing Drawings

EDA has three different methods of document import:

• The user selects files and folders containing drawings and lets EDA import them.
• EDA also has a "Virtual Scanner". Wide format scanners normally capture images into a predefined "hot folder". Virtual Scanner "scans" this "hot folder" and if a new file appears, EDA adds this new file into the archive automatically.
• Using RasterID or WiseScan as EDA's archive data provider. This is the most efficient way to scan and archive large quantities of documents.

Multiuser Access

EDA 3 goes beyond the simple personal archive functionality with its multiuser access. Records are automatically locked during update to prevent data loss. EDA 3 stores the name of the last user who modified the data. Date and time of last modification is also stored. EDA 3 can be customized both in look and functionality according to a user's access level.

Filtering

To find a desired drawing efficiently is a must for each archiving solution. EDA supplies a simple and powerful drawings query mechanism. User queries forms a filter for selecting one drawing or a set of drawings matching the search criteria. Filter settings can be stored and reused when required.

View and Markup Documents

The embedded viewer can display files in many drawing formats — raster, vector or hybrid — a combination of raster and vector drawings. Full multipage raster support was added with a special multipage file creator tool. Supported raster single and / or multi-page formats are: TIFF, CALS, RLC, JPG, BMP, PCX, C4, TG4, CIT, MrSID and PDF. Vector formats are: CWS and VCx (CSoft's proprietary formats) plus DWG, DXF, EMF, WMF, HPGL and PLT. Convenient markup tool with markup data layering facilitates communication and collaboration between users of stored documents.

Multipage documents and multiform support

To support structures in multipage documents the multiform feature is used. It includes the ability to define different sets of forms for the same archive depending on record type and condition. The correspondence between the record type and a subset of forms is stored in the database. It makes the data input process more structured as well as speeding up and simplifying the navigation through the archive.

"Hybrid document database" feature

EDA can store drawings, images, maps and more, but beyond this simple file storage — it can also store "hybrid drawings" e.g. raster background plus the image-referenced text fields in the database. Each field in a form can be linked to an individual region on a specified page. In addition EDA can create image-referenced comments.

EDA 3 has built in engineering changes support. Initially all the data may be scanned raster files. Then step by step this data can be converted to text or vector graphics when the need arises using external CSoft tools like WiseImageŠ. This also allows maintenance cycles to be maintained and issued from one central archive. The image-referenced links simplify access to the data in raster form. Key fields with image-referenced links enable fast access to hybrid data. Users can now get all the information they need from EDA 3 at a very reasonable cost.

Plotting

It takes time to fine tune plot output from an archive when it contains files of many different raster and vector formats. EDA utilizes Plot Templates to streamline this task. All individual plot parameter definitions can be stored in a Plot Template and be reused at will.

More about EDA on vendor's site.