What Contractors Choice holds
Contractors Choice is your company's own catalogue, kept alongside the main component database. It is where the items your company has chosen for itself live: negotiated products, internal codes that stand in for a generic catalogue equivalent, specials, and anything that does not exist in the supplier data at all.
Linking a group to a Contractors Choice item works exactly like linking to a component. The difference is the source and the columns you search on. Use it when the job is being priced against your own product decisions rather than the catalogue defaults.
Opening the Contractors Choice view
Contractors Choice is one of the five views in the Database Items window, not a separate window.
- 1
In the sidebar, find the group and click its grey link button. On an Annotation group, open the menu and click Link Item instead.
- 2
In the table toolbar, open the dataset dropdown and choose Contractors Choice.
- 3
Check the line under the heading reads Contractors Choice database and the search box reads Search CC items....
- 4
Search or filter to find the item you want.
- 5
Double-click the row. The window closes and the link is applied.
The columns
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
| ID Code | The Contractors Choice ID code. This becomes the group's code. |
| Description | The item description. This becomes the group's description. |
| Special No. | The internal special number used for variants of the same item. |
| Quantity | The item's standard quantity. |
| Category | Top-level category. |
| Heading | Mid-level heading within the category. |
| Group | Sub-group within the heading. |
| Linear | Marks items billed by length rather than per unit. |
Click any column header to sort by it. Search covers the ID code and the description.
The Linear filter
Contractors Choice does not use a unit-of-measure code, so length-billed items are marked with the Linear flag instead. That flag is both a filter button and the pre-filter the window applies for you.
- Open the window from a Linear group and Linear is already set to
true, so only length-billed items are listed. - Open it from a Count, Detection or Area group and no filter is applied — Contractors Choice is the one view that is not narrowed for those types.
The pre-filter shows as a chip in the toolbar. Clear the chip if the item you need is not flagged as linear but you still want it on a Linear group.
Every pre-filter is cleared and reapplied each time the window opens, so it always reflects the group you opened it from and never carries over from the previous group.
What the group row shows afterwards
- The row's link button turns blue .
- The group's menu shows the ID code with the description beneath it, and an button whose tooltip reads Unlink CC item.
- In Review mode the code and description are laid out to the right of the row, with a Remove button whose tooltip reads Remove linked CC item.
The count or measurement on the row does not change. Linking records what the group is, not how much of it there is.
Unlinking
Any of these removes the link, with no confirmation:
- Click the blue button on the group row.
- Open the menu and click Unlink CC item beside the code.
- In Review mode, click Remove to the right of the row.
The markers are untouched; only the code and description are dropped. To swap one item for another, unlink first and then link again — the row button on a linked group removes the link rather than reopening the window.
The item you just removed stays in the Recent view of the window for the rest of the session, so switching back after a mistaken unlink is two clicks.
Contractors Choice in the export
Contractors Choice links fill the Code and Description columns of the Excel workbook exactly as component links do, on the drawing's own sheet and on the Totals sheet. The workbook does not record which catalogue a code came from, so if the distinction matters downstream, keep your Contractors Choice codes visibly different from your component codes.
Common issues
The item I want is not listed
Check the toolbar for a filter chip. On a Linear group the Linear = true pre-filter is the usual cause — an item your company has not flagged as linear will not appear until you clear it. Also confirm the dataset dropdown still reads Contractors Choice, because the search box only covers the current view.
The status line says Not loaded or Failed to load data
Click the button in the window header to load the catalogues again.
Next steps
- The Database Items window — every view, filter and search box in one place.
- Linking to assemblies — bundle several components behind one link.
- Linked Takeoff — choose the item before you start counting.
- The cross-drawing summary — link every drawing's groups from one table.