Places bar

[DaveP]

Can I use urls in my Places Bar?
We have forever had drive lettered path shortcuts in our Places Bar, but with working at home via VPN, the drive letters don't "wake up" until they have been accessed.
In other words, after we connect to the office via VPN, Revit doesn't see any mapped drives.
In Windows Explorer they show up with a red x on the drive until you click on it and "wake it up".
Once you've clicked on each letter, Revit will see it, but not until then.

So, the logical would be to use urls instead of mapped drive letters.
But I'm seeing the same results when I edit the Places to use the full url instead of the drive letter.
Even with the url, the shortcut shows blank until I access that path thru Windows Explorer. Then Revit sees the path
The top icon is still mapped to P:\, but the next two down have urls

[kingjosiah]

Ha! No one responded. I'm bummed. I was waiting to see if anyone had some input. "Waking up" these shortcuts every morning before firing up Revit has been the bane of my existence since March.

But your post inspired me to rethink what my shortcuts were pointed to. To that end, I just changed all of mine from mapped drives to UNC mapping --- which is actually a better solution considering that we're using DFS mapped shares. And now everything works like a dream and no longer needs to be woken up. I'm not sure i've seen URL's for pathing before.....I'm interested to see how that works.

Jon

[PatrickGSR94]

Don't use URL's or mapped drives. Use the UNC path (i.e. \\server\share\folder\...) to access your network folder, and then save that location to Places.

When I'm at home and launch Revit, it takes AGES for the Open window to actually come up because it's looking for the network locations and can't find them. But if I connect my VPN first, and then click Open, the window comes right up, and the button will access the network location immediately.

So remove all those white folders in your Places bar, then type in the actual UNC path in the file name box, whatever it is that your P: drive points to (with VPN connected obviously). Once that location is showing in your Open window, save that location to Places. Same for all your other locations, Imperial Library etc.

[DaveP]

Sorry, my bad wording.
I am using the UNC path, not a url.
As am experiment now, I'm trying on as a mapped drive, and one as a UNC
Both point to the same place, just different subfolders
i.e. N: is mapped to \\bwbr.com\echelon\masters

[Twiceroadsfool]

You can absolutely use UNC paths, because a lot of firms dont use Drive Letters AT ALL. We dont. Everything is all UNC path, all the time.

You should also note, bad things can happen if SOME people use Drive Letters, and OTHER people use UNC Paths, and there are workshared files involved. Do not recommend.

[PatrickGSR94]

Is your server name in your office actually "bwbr.com"? I wouldn't think that a UNC path with an internet URL would work very well or very fast, but I've never tried it so I don't know.

[Twiceroadsfool]

Its common. It happens when servers are set up for things like DFSR, where things are replicating amongst various locations. It doesnt mean it navigates over the internet to get there.

[PatrickGSR94]

so yeah, the UNC path buttons should work fine. I always try to remember to connect VPN first before opening Revit. although these days I usually am using some form of remote desktop to work directly from my office machine.

[DaveP]

Here's what I'm seeing after connecting to the VPN, but before touching any of the drives

After I click on each drive in Windows Explorer, everything shows up as expected.

[Twiceroadsfool]

Here's what I'm seeing after connecting to the VPN, but before touching any of the drives

After I click on each drive in Windows Explorer, everything shows up as expected.

I imagine if you connected to VPN prior to launching Revit, they would "work" even if the folder looked incorrect (because it might look incorrect based on what it thinks is the disconnected state from Explorer).

Then again, we have "Travel mode" specifically so we DONT try to access network shares across the VPN, so i havent looked at this in years.