You’ve probably all had this happen to you:

• You select Browse from the WorkPage

• The Open dialog takes you to your C: drive or your Documents folder instead of to the DGN folder for your WorkSet

This is incredibly frustrating, having to repeatedly navigate through layers of folders to get to the correct location.

Here is a workaround that will help alleviate this situation:

• In a System or Application-level configuration file, define a variable with the parent path to your project folders. (Something like this: AAA = M:/OpenRoads/Projects/)
  
  NOTE: Use a variable name like AAA so that it will appear first alphabetically in the variable list. This will eliminate having to scroll down a long list of variables to find the desired one.

With this variable defined, you can select this variable as needed when the above situation occurs.

• From the Open dialog, click Directory > Select Configuration Variable

• Select your custom variable from the top of the list and click OK

• The Open dialog will be redirected to the path defined by your variable

You will still need to navigate down to the correct project folder, but this will save some navigation clicks.

If you have different project folder paths for different WorkSpaces, you can define a different variable for each:

AAA_IDOT = M:/OpenRoads/Projects/IDOT/
AAA_IOWA = M:/OpenRoads/Projects/Iowa DOT/
AAA_MNDOT = M:/OpenRoads/Projects/MnDOT/