Projects (Multi-Project Workspace)

Projects (Multi-Project Workspace)

LocusBIM organizes your PDFs and issues by project. Every PDF you open and every issue you file is tagged with a project, so when you switch projects you only see the work for that engagement, no mixing, no manual filtering, no "which PDF belongs to which client?" confusion.

The Default Project

On first run, LocusBIM creates a project called "Default". Everything you open or create lands here until you choose otherwise. If you only ever work on one project at a time, you can ignore the Projects menu entirely and Default does the right thing.

Creating a Project

Open the Projects menu in the top bar. Type a name (e.g. "1234 King St, Tenant Fit-Out" or "Q3 Hospital Renovation") and confirm. LocusBIM stores the project locally in SQLite. There's no cloud round-trip, no signup, no waiting.

Switching Projects

Click any project name in the Projects menu to make it active. Three things change immediately:

1. PDF list: Recent Files and the open-PDF flow only show docs tagged with this project.
2. Issue list: IssueList queries filter to this project, so the issue count, the panel, and search results scope to it.
3. Cost impact: the Cost Impact toolbar has a "PDF | Project" segmented toggle. PDF shows costs for the active PDF only; Project rolls up costs across every PDF in the current project. Other projects' costs never appear in either view.

How a PDF Gets Tagged

When you open a new PDF (File → Open PDF…, drag-drop, or the Recent menu), it's tagged with the currently-active project at insert time. The tag is persistent, switching projects later does not move PDFs between them. If you opened a PDF under the wrong project, the easiest fix today is to close it, switch project, and reopen it (it'll get the new tag).

Deleting a Project

Deleting a project does not delete its PDFs or issues. They move into the "unassigned" bucket of the Default project so you can re-tag them later. This is deliberate, an accidental delete is always recoverable.

When To Use Projects

1. You work on multiple active engagements in parallel and want the visual clutter down.
2. You need clean per-project reports, BCF export, cost CSV, and issue counts all scope to the active project.
3. You hand off a project, switch to it, export its issues + cost report, then archive. No need to filter across a year of mixed work.

If you're a solo practitioner with one active project at a time, Projects is invisible, just stay on Default.

Team Members

Each project has a lightweight team list: open it from the project menu under Team members…. Add the people who review the project with a display name, an optional email, and a discipline (architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, civil, or unassigned). The discipline you set here is the source of truth: Khatam uses it to rank the @mention list in markup comments, putting the right-discipline reviewer first on each markup. Khatam never edits the list. You declare the disciplines; Khatam only orders the suggestions.