Create description key sets

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In this drawing, we're going to create description key sets and define marker styles and label styles for a few raw descriptions.

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What description key sets do is they look at a raw description for a point,

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and apply set styles and parameters to those points based on what the description is.

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So, in order to get description key sets, what we have to do is navigate over to the Toolspace window and go to the Settings tab.

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We're going to expand Points and expand Description Key Sets and you'll see that we have a current description key set of essentials in here.

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If you wanted to create a new description key set, you could right click on that and select New.

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What I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to edit the existing one that's in this drawing,

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and by selecting Edit Keys after right clicking on it.

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In this Panorama window, you'll see your full description key set and each of the description keys associated with it.

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We currently have ones that say STA, SWMH and TR, all with an asterisk behind.

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The asterisk basically tells Civil 3D to ignore anything that comes after the raw description of whatever comes before it.

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In our case, say, for example, tree, oftentimes you'll just have a point that says TR and then it'll have a space and then it'll say 12 pine.

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And so that's telling us that it's a 12 inch pine tree.

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But what the description key set does is it says take TR and apply all these parameters,

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and ignore the 12 and the pine for how you're going to display this.

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Moving on from there, you can force a style, you can force a point label style,

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so a marker style and a point label style, a format which is a full description of that point.

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The layer that you're going to put that point on and then you can have scale parameters.

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So, like in our 12 tree, 12 is a scale parameter and 12 would be the first parameter and you can scale your points based on that parameter,

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or you can choose not to do that and it will be whatever your marker style says that it's going to be for size.

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You can also apply rotation based on a second parameter and force those rotations or you can rotate them manually later.

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What I'm going to go ahead and do is if I right click on this and I choose New, I can create a new description key set.

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And I'm going to create it for the points that are in our drawing, which is CALC, with all caps.

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And I'm going to apply asterisk to the end of it, so I can ignore anything that comes after CALC.

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I'm going to force a marker style of standard.

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I'm going to force a point label style of description only.

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I'm going to force a format of survey search point because we're searching for points on our parcel.

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I'm going to force a layer of V-NODE.

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And then I'm going to leave all of my scale parameters and rotation parameters as they currently exist.

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As you can see, it could take a long time to create a description key set for many points that are inside of a drawing.

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So if you have a description key in a drawing that you want to port over to this drawing,

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you can do so by going over to the Toolspace window and going to this dropdown for Active Drawing Settings view.

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If you drop this down and you choose Master view, it will show you all of the drawings that you currently have open inside of Civil 3D.

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So at the top, you can see the file that I'm working in and lower in here, you can see a file that I have called Blank Base description key sets.

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This description key set, as you can see, is quite larger than the description key set that we have in the current working file.

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So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to close this down,

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I'm going to find my description key set for my blank base with description key sets.

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I'm going to find essentials and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to select it and I'm going to drag it down to the current working file.

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I'm going to expand that current working file. I'm going to go to Points, I'm going to expand Points.

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Then I'm going to go to Description Key Sets and I'm going to drop it inside of this Description Key Set folder.

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And what you'll see is I get a warning that I have a duplicate item name because I want to overwrite this essentials in my current working drawing.

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I want to go ahead and choose Overwrite, I'm going to select "OK".

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And then if I go into my working file and I change from master review to active drawing settings view,

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and I go to my points, description key sets, essentials, right click and edit keys,

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you'll see all of those description keys that were in my base drawing have been ported over into my current active drawing.

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So I'm going to go ahead and select "OK" for this.

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And the next thing you have to understand is that because you have created description key set,

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does not mean that the points that are already in the drawing are going to display with that description key set.

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Any point that's already created will stay as it is, unless you force the description key set over the existing points.

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New points will accept the description key set, but old points will stay as they are unless you force them.

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So what we're going to go ahead do is we're going to select Points, we're going to right click,

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and we're going to choose Select to select all the points in the drawing.

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We're going to right click and inside of this, you'll see apply description key sets.

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If you select Apply Description Key Sets, it will apply the key sets to all the points that are currently selected.

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So I'm going to choose Apply Description Key Sets and what you'll see happen here is our benchmark point, marker style changed to a standard,

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and our description label style changed so that it's labeling our full description, not our raw description.