Skip to content

The screen

Shipbuilder has one screen. Learn it once and every menu item is familiar, because the Document register and the Space overview are the same page with different columns.

The Document overview on the left with the register as a grid, and the detail page of the fire control plan open beside it on the right, showing tabs, a Document block with its attributes, a Shows spaces grid and the revisions.
Documents, with the fire control plan opened. Left: the overview page. Right: its detail page.

Documents, with the fire control plan opened. Left: the overview page. Right: its detail page.

Overview page, detail page

The overview page is a menu item — Documents above, or Configuration → Spaces: every document, every space, every person. It is a grid, and everything on the Grids page applies to it.

The detail page is one record, and it opens beside the overview rather than replacing it — so you can work down a list without losing your place. The in its top right corner closes it; the slider between the two halves decides how the room is shared. Drag it left for a wide detail page, right for a wide list.

Clicking an underlined value is what opens things. In an overview, an underlined value opens the detail page beside it. In a detail page, an underlined value opens a popup over the page — a quick look at the cost code, the person, the space — which Esc closes without losing anything. If nothing is underlined in a column, that column is not a way in.

Tabs are views, not folders

Both halves have tabs, and they mean different things.

On an overview page, a tab is a prepared view of the same records: In use and Not in use split the list by whether the record is current; on the register, All documents is the register itself. Nothing is hidden from you by picking a tab — you are looking at the same records through a different window.

On a detail page, the first tab holds the attributes and the relationship blocks; the others are the relationships that deserve the whole width — Comments, Transmittals — and, further down, the revisions split into Actual and Other.

Nodes and relationships first, then properties

A detail page is made of two kinds of thing, and telling them apart is the whole skill.

The attributes block is the record itself — its number, its name, whether it is in use, who created it — together with the things it is connected to one-to-one: its cost code, its originator, its type. Editing a value here changes this record and nothing else. The underlined ones are connections, and open the other record.

Every other block is a relationship, and each is a small grid: Shows spaces, Has revisions, Has comments. A row in one of those blocks is a link to a record that lives somewhere else. That is what “entered once” looks like from the inside: the same person is the area manager of six spaces without being stored six times, and renaming them once renames them everywhere.

So you read a page top-down: what is this, what is it connected to, and then what does it say. The data model is the picture behind that order.

The Dashboard

Signing in lands you on the Dashboard: the comments you raised that are still open, with the revision, document or transmittal each one is about.

The Dashboard with the My open comments grid showing three open comments, each with the revision, document or transmittal it is about.
The Dashboard: what you raised and nobody has settled yet. Settle a comment here and it leaves the list.

The Dashboard: what you raised and nobody has settled yet. Settle a comment here and it leaves the list.

It is deliberately personal — other people’s open comments are under Communication → Comments. Its Status column is editable: set a comment to Approved and the row is gone on the next reload, which is the point of the page.