When a diagram is created, an SCDIAG element is created in the database, and this contains a pseudo attribute (VISF) that provides the file name of the actual file in the file system. File names are composed by <element ID><session no>. This mechanism and naming convention supports the Dabacon session concept and provides a possibility for GLOBAL to manage the files in a multi-location project. These file names are not visible to the user. The user will handle all diagrams through the index elements in the database and will only see the names of the index elements.

This mechanism creates new files each time a Save Work is executed. This means that when users have been working for a certain amount of time, a large quantity of files may exist in the %<PROJECTCODE>DIA% directory, in the same way that a Dabacon database grows as sessions are being added. There is currently no mechanism to automatically delete obsolete versions of the files when a database session merge is executed, however the Diagrams application provides a tool for removing old session files from a project. It could be used manually when KEEP_SESSION_FILES is set to False. For more information please refer to Clean Old Session Files in Chapter Utilities.

On large diagrams, or diagrams that contain detailed imported background drawings, the creation of the SVG file may take some time to execute. This could affect the performance of the Save Work command. For that reason a possibility to control the SVG creation has been introduced.

Whether the SVG file is created or not depends on the General Options > System configuration > SVG setting in Diagrams Options.