This article provides information about the Settings/Configuration/Comments Library page. Upload your standard comments and checklists into the Library to provide a resource for your plan review staff. There is no limit to the number of records that can be uploaded to the Library.

Prerequisites:

Configure Groups for Permitting and Design Review Lists.
Configure Review Types for Permitting and Design Review Lists.
Configure Comment Sources for Permitting and Design Review Lists.
Configure Categories and Sub-categories for Permitting and Design Review Lists (optional.)
Gather plan reviewer checklists and standard comments.
1. Verify that comments to be uploaded correct accurate.

Standard Comment records require:

A Purpose (Permitting or Design Review)
Comment content text (max. 8,000 characters).

Best Practices

In addition to the required Purpose and content text, include a Group and Comment Source for each comment record, at minimum. These records will be used to generate project comment reports, so the more optional fields you provide, the comprehensive your client deliverables will be, and the better data analytics you can capture for reporting, etc.

In this article:

Understanding the Comments Library

Standard comments uploaded to the Library can be inserted into plan review projects.
- When records from the Library are inserted into a project, the record's Group, Source, Review Type and category/sub-category values are inserted as well.
Comment records can be batch uploaded into the Library via the Sample Spreadsheet template CSV or XLS format.
Comment records can be manually added/edited to the Library.
Comments flagged ‘in-active’ are not visible to users for plan review.
Where applicable, comment records should be associated to a Group and Review type, Comment source and Checklist name.
Comment records are associated to either For Permitting or For Design Review purpose.

Batch update features allow selected records to be:

Comments Library page

Marked as active or in-active.
Copied as ‘New’ comment records.
Deleted.

About Category and Sub-category lists

Client's who want to generate project correction report/deficiency reports that are grouped by headings and/or sub-headings should enter those values as Category and Sub-category list types.

For example:

Standard Comments can be associated to a 'General Requirements' category and a 'Building Envelope' sub-category.

The Sort Order value of those list records is then used to control the sorting on the correction reports.

Preparing Comments for Batch Upload

Follow these best practices to prepare standard comments for batch upload:

Start by downloading this SampleStandardComment.csv
Using Microsoft Excel add your standard comments to the sample SampleStandardComment.csv
During upload, data mapping is based on the Row 1 labels. Do not rename the column headers.
Export your standard comments as DOS comma separated values (csv)
1. On Windows Excel "Save As" "CSV (MS-DOS)(*.csv)
2. On Mac go to File > Save As... MS-DOS Comma Separted (.csv)
Data that maps to any List Type is validated by the list item Label or Abbreviation as shown in the screen shot below.
1. For each comment being uploaded, provide either the entire item label or the entire item abbreviation to populate these columns in the spreadsheet.

Click here to download the CSV template for comments

List Type record example

Uploading to the Comments Library

From the Comment Library page, download the CSV template using the download icon.
Enter the standard comment into the CONTENT column.
Complete the other columns as shown below, validating that the Purpose, Review Type, Sources, Categories, Groups have matching Label or Abbreviation values.
Set 'Active' to False only if the comment should be unavailable to users.
Enter any text in the Checklist Name column desired, there is no corresponding List that manages checklist names.
Save the file in CSV or XLS format.
Select the batch upload icon on the Comments Library page.