When importing a gbxml file, it is first important to obtain the gbxml file itself. While this sounds pretty obvious, obtaining the file requires that either you do the auto-desk design work yourself, or have an architect do it and get the xml file from them. In this case we have an example file, so we go to the file menu, select import, and select gbxml. Here we can double click our example gbxml file and we will be immediately prompted on what to import. There are several options to import, apart from just the building geometry. We can import the internal loads, ventilation air flows, partitions and design temperatures so long as they were included the in the gbxml file. Keep in mind that if these are selected, they will be brought into trace without using templates. So sometimes it's best, especially if you know you're going to change them, to leave them unselected, and just import the geometry data.
There are two options below, check for remove drawing objects that will be available if you ever re-import the gbxml file. In this case we are importing a file with five rooms. If a sixth room was added, we could re-import the file, and if we did not check this, all six rooms would be brought in. The other option is to use the name as the space identifier. Basically, in the xml file, the spaces have two ways of getting names. One of them is labeled name-- it is the typical means of importing a file, so we’ll leave that checked. If we click okay, it will tell us our import is complete. Notice that we can now export to gbxml, though, since we have not run the file, we wouldn’t be exporting anything to that file. If we re-imported the gbxml file, we would get the options again, but now we can check for remove drawing objects. If we check that, and uncheck use name as space identifier, and click okay, we're going to get ten total rooms since the other five rooms were imported again.
Please note, we have the names, and we imported them using the space identifier, which shows us the benefit of importing the room names. If we import again, and select the same example file, and we don’t check for remove drawing objects, and we check the space name, we can click okay, and now it will prompt us that ‘The room already exists, do you wish to update its entries?’ And we're going to check apply to all, and select yes. So any changes in the xml file in the meantime would be applied to those rooms. Keep in mind, it's important to keep the xml file with the same name. If we tried to export to another file, we could not export to any gbxml; we could not export to any gbxml besides the gbxml file with the same name. Remember, you cannot export until you have calculated, as we see here.
The import gbxml process in TRACE 700 is actually quite simple. One thing to note is that it doesn't bring in the weather information, so that will have to be selected. The other thing to note is that the import is only as good as the gbxml model. It takes a bit of communication and you'll probably encounter glitches. But, in a short while, you'll be able to successfully import gbxml files without a hitch.