When working with source drawings, it is important to understand the terminology that you must be

familiar with. The current drawing is also known as the master drawing, or the project drawing. The

attached drawings are also known as the source drawings.

The relationship between the current and source drawings can be confusing, at first. One way to think

of it is that the current drawing is really the master drawing. That is, the drawing that you are currently

in and are attaching source drawings to is the master drawing. The source drawings are the drawings

or data that are attached to the current-or master-drawing.

Once you understand this concept, you must learn how you can organize them to work with them

efficiently. There are two different ways to organize source drawings.

One is the layered method. With this method, you will likely have many different drawings covering

the same geographic area, and each drawing contains a layer of distinct information, or a complete

theme. For example, one drawing might contain all of the parcels in a city or county, and another

drawing might contain all of the sewer lines, while a third drawing might contain all of the water lines.

In this example, all three of these drawings share the same geographic locations, but they are broken

out into separate drawings for this method of data organization. You can attach those as source

drawings and bring them all together into a single drawing through attachment, and overlay them in

the current drawing.

The other method of organization is a tiled method. With a tiled method, each drawing contains all of

the infrastructure information for a section of the geographic area. For example, a single drawing

would contain the parcels, sewer lines, and water lines, but these drawings are broken up into smaller

pieces, or tiles on a grid, to cover the entire city or county. This was a method that was commonly

used when large drawings had to be broken up in order for AutoCAD to work efficiently with these

large data sets. Many organizations still use this method, and AutoCAD Map 3D provides excellent

tools to work within this system.

Attaching source drawings is a method of data management that offers flexibility, whether your

drawings are organized in either, or both of these methods. Some AutoCAD Map users have taken

this to the point that they never directly open a map, but rather use a single master drawing, with
attached source drawings to access all of their drawing data. They look at their drawings as a large

data store that they can attach, rather than directly open. Another advantage is that these tools work

well in a multi-user environment.