Automatic Placements
In network views, the term “placements” refers to the positioning of activities and relationship lines.
You can position activities in a view manually, or you can have Open Plan calculate placements automatically using an algorithm designed to minimize the need for relationship lines to cross each other. Placements calculated in this fashion can result in network diagrams that are much easier to decipher, particularly in the case of very large projects.
Initially, the position of an activity in a network view depends on how you create it:
- If you add an activity by double-clicking in the view or by drawing a relationship from an existing activity, Open Plan places the activity in the position you indicated.
- If you create an activity using the Add Activity command, Open Plan places it in the middle of the current view.
- If you create an activity in a view other than a network view, Open Plan places the new activity below the existing activities when you return to the network view.
If you choose to have Open Plan calculate placements automatically, you can control these calculations with options to avoid displaying activities across page breaks, to show activities from all hierarchical levels of the project, to filter the activities displayed, or to arrange activities either in zones based on the contents of an activity field such as a code or along a time scale.
In addition to allowing for options such as filters, zoning, and time-scaling, automatic placements differ from manual placements in how Open Plan preserves the placement information for the view between sessions. For automatic placements, Open Plan stores your settings for how the placements are calculated. It does not, however, store the actual placements themselves. Placements are recalculated each time the view is opened.
If you perform automatic placements and want to preserve them for future sessions, you can save them as manual placements. You also have the ability to perform automatic placement calculations and then make adjustments to the activity positions manually. You can then save these modified automatic placements if you want to preserve them between sessions.
Open Plan stores placement settings separately for each network view assigned to a project. This means, for example, you can define one set of placement options for FLOWVW in the project Clean, and another set for DEVFLOW (another network view) in the same project. You can also define different placement settings for these same views when they are opened within a different project.
The Placements dialog box controls the operations of the placements feature.