Understanding drawing areas, drawing sets, sheets, and revisions

Constructable keeps your project's drawings organized and makes sure the team sees the latest published information. A few terms show up throughout the drawing workflow, so it helps to understand how they fit together before uploading your first set.

Best for: Everyone who works with drawings · Outcome: Understand where an upload goes and what the team can see.

The short version

• A drawing area is a container for a related collection of drawings.
• A drawing set is a package of PDF files uploaded together.
• A sheet is an individual drawing page, such as A101 or M201.
• A revision is a newer version of an existing sheet.

Most projects only need one drawing area. Within that area, you can upload as many drawing sets and revisions as the project requires.

Drawing areas

A drawing area is the top-level container for drawings within a project. It keeps its own drawing sets, sheets, disciplines, and revision history.

If your project has only one drawing area, Constructable keeps it mostly out of the way. If your project has multiple areas, you can switch between them from the Drawings page.

Multiple drawing areas are useful when parts of a project have genuinely separate plan collections—for example:

• Separate buildings on one campus
• A base building and a tenant-improvement package
• Distinct phases that need independent drawing indexes

Avoid creating a new drawing area for every issuance or revision. Those belong in separate drawing sets within the same area. Splitting related revisions across drawing areas prevents Constructable from treating them as versions of the same sheet.

Drawing sets

A drawing set is one upload package. It usually represents a plan issuance, addendum, bulletin, or other group of PDFs received together.

When you create a drawing set, you can enter:

• A drawing set name
• The date it was received
• A default sheet date
• An optional description
• One or more PDF files

Constructable processes each PDF and separates it into individual sheets. It also attempts to detect each sheet's number, title, discipline, and scale. You review those results before the sheets can be published.

The drawing set remains available after publishing, so you can always see which upload a revision came from. Deleting a set removes its sheets from the active drawing workflow, so double-check the set before confirming a deletion.

Sheets and drawings

A sheet is an individual page from an uploaded drawing set. In everyday use, you'll usually identify it by its sheet number and title—for example, A101: First Floor Plan.

Constructable connects every version of A101 to one logical drawing. This allows the system to maintain revision history instead of showing every upload as an unrelated sheet.

The Drawings page shows the latest published revision of each drawing. Older revisions are still available from the drawing viewer, but they do not appear as separate rows in the main drawing index.

Some details belong to the drawing as a whole, while others belong to one revision:

• Sheet number, title, and discipline generally apply across every revision.
• Sheet date, publication state, and revision number apply to a specific revision.

This distinction matters when editing details. Constructable tells you whether a change will affect one revision or every revision of the sheet.

Revisions

When you publish a newly uploaded version of an existing sheet, Constructable adds it to that drawing's revision history. The newest published version becomes the current revision shown on the Drawings page.

From the drawing viewer, you can:

• Open an earlier revision
• Return to the current revision
• Compare revisions side by side
• Overlay revisions to highlight changes

If you're viewing an older revision, Constructable displays a notice so you know a newer version is available.

Constructable matches revisions using the sheet details confirmed during review. Make sure sheet numbers are accurate and consistent. A typo such as A-101 instead of A101 may prevent a new upload from being connected to the sheet you expected.

How the pieces fit together

Here is a typical drawing lifecycle:

1. An administrator opens the appropriate drawing area.
2. They create a drawing set and upload one or more PDFs.
3. Constructable processes the files and extracts the individual sheets.
4. An administrator reviews and confirms each sheet's details.
5. The confirmed sheets remain unpublished until an administrator publishes them.
6. Published sheets appear on the Drawings page for project members with drawing access.
7. Future uploads with matching sheet identities become new revisions of those drawings.

Good to know

• Confirming and publishing are separate steps. Confirming validates a sheet's information. Publishing makes it available to the wider project team.
• The Drawings page is not the same as the Drawing Sets page. The Drawings page shows the latest published sheets. The Drawing Sets page shows upload packages and their processing, review, and publication status.
• Unpublished sheets have limited visibility. They are generally available to drawing administrators while being prepared, but they do not appear in the main drawing index for the wider project team.
• Drawing permissions matter. Project members with drawing access can view published sheets. Uploading, reviewing, editing, publishing, and unpublishing require drawing-management permission.
• Use consistent sheet numbers. Accurate sheet numbers are essential for revision matching, drawing links, and search.

Once this structure is in place, the rest of the drawing workflow—reviewing uploads, publishing revisions, searching sheets, and using the viewer—becomes much easier to follow.

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