Merging Groups

When to merge

Symbol searches often need two goes. You outline a socket, get most of them, then outline the odd one drawn slightly differently and get the rest — and now the same device sits in two groups with two counts. Merging puts them back together into a single group with one label, one colour, one price and one total.

The same thing happens with linear takeoff: two samples along the same service produce two groups where you wanted one.

Which group survives

Merging always works in one direction: you start on the group you want to lose and pick the group you want to keep.

If the group you want to keep has the worse name, rename it first — it takes a second and saves rebuilding the merge.

Merging from the sidebar

1. 1

   Find the group you want to get rid of.

2. 2

   On a Detection group, click the merge icon on the row. On a Linear, Area or Count group, open the menu and choose Merge into .

3. 3

   A list of every other group of the same type appears, newest first. Detection groups show their template thumbnail beside the label; the others show a colour swatch.

4. 4

   Click the group you want to keep. The merge runs straight away.

The merge control is greyed out when the group is empty, or when there is no other group of that type to merge into. Annotation groups cannot be merged at all, and you can never merge across types — a Linear group has lengths where a Count group has a count, so the two cannot be combined.

Merging a single marker instead

Sometimes only a few markers are in the wrong place, not the whole group. Two lighter-touch options do that job without deleting anything:

• Drag a thumbnail. Drag a detection card onto another Detection group's thumbnail area. It, and every other selected detection, moves across and takes on the target group's colour. The group you dragged from stays.
• Use the marker action menu. Select a single detection on the drawing and click Merge into group. Pick a group, or New group to give that one marker a group of its own.

See Selecting and moving markers for the drag gesture, and Marker menus for the action menu.

Repeating the merge on other drawings

A split symbol is rarely split on one sheet only. If the same pair of groups exists on other drawings in the project, ZeroCount offers to make the same merge there too.

After the merge, a dialog appears headed Merge on N other drawing(s)?. It names what you just did — the group that was merged into which — and lists the drawings where the same pair was found, each with its category and how many groups would be merged on it.

1. 1

   Read the list of drawings. Each row shows the file name, the category it sits in, and the number of groups that would be merged there.

2. 2

   Check the Skipped: list if there is one. It names drawings that were left out, and why.

3. 3

   Tick Always merge on other drawings without asking if you want ZeroCount to go ahead automatically from now on.

4. 4

   Click Merge on N drawing(s) to apply it, or Cancel to leave the other drawings alone.

If no other drawing holds a matching pair, the dialog reads Nothing to merge on other drawings and offers only Close.

Why a drawing might be skipped

Two reasons appear in the Skipped: list:

• Completed — the drawing is marked Completed, so nothing writes to it. Set it back to In Progress if you want the merge to reach it. See Drawing status.
• two or more groups here match — merge them first — that drawing has more than one candidate, so ZeroCount cannot tell which one you meant. Open it and merge by hand.

Drawings that simply never had this pair of groups are not listed. They are not being skipped; there was nothing to do.

Getting the prompt back

If you ticked Always merge on other drawings without asking and want the confirmation back, open User Preferences from the user menu, go to Confirmations, and turn Merging groups across drawings back on. See User preferences.

Common issues

The merge icon is greyed out

The group is empty, or it is the only group of its type on the drawing. Add at least one marker, or create the destination group first.

The group I wanted to keep disappeared

You started from it rather than picking it. Merging always removes the group you started on. There is no undo, so rebuild by dragging the markers back out into a new group, or reopen a duplicate of the project if you took one.

Next steps

• Managing groups — renaming and deleting, and the rest of the group menu.
• Marker menus — moving one marker at a time.
• Merging and deleting across drawings — tidying groups from the Review-mode summary.
• Detection tips — how to avoid the split in the first place.