Groups and Tags — What Is the Difference?
Doclio gives you two ways to organise drawings, and they work best together:
- Groups (also called disciplines, and what you might think of as categories) are where a drawing is filed. A drawing lives in one group — Architectural, Structural, Electrical, and so on.
- Tags are flexible labels you stick on across that structure. A drawing can carry as many tags as you like, and a single tag can pull together drawings from several different groups.
The simplest way to remember it: a drawing sits in one group, but can wear many tags. Groups answer "what discipline is this?"; tags answer "what else is this part of?".
A Worked Example — a Tag That Crosses Disciplines
Say your project has four groups: Architectural, Structural, Electrical and Mechanical. Your electrician needs more than just the electrical sheets — they also need:
- the reflected ceiling plan (filed under Architectural) to set out light fittings,
- the roof plan (filed under Structural) for penetrations and cable routes, and
- the mechanical plan (filed under Mechanical) that shows the electrical connections to the mechanical equipment.
You do not want to move those sheets out of their proper groups — they belong where they are. Instead, add one tag, Electrician, to each of them (and to the electrical drawings themselves). Now clicking the Electrician tag shows every sheet the electrician needs, gathered from all four disciplines, while each drawing stays filed where it should be.
The same pattern works for any trade — a Plumber, Tiler or Waterproofer tag pulls the handful of sheets that person cares about out of a large set in one click.
More Ways to Use Tags
Status — Draft, In Review, Final, As-Built
Give each drawing a status tag and update it as the drawing progresses: Draft to In Review to Final to As-Built. Filter to Final when you issue a construction set, or to As-Built at handover, so you share only the drawings at the right stage. (A drawing usually has one status tag at a time — swap the old one for the new as it moves along.)
Building levels — Level 1, Level 2, Level 3
Tag drawings by the level they relate to — Ground Floor, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Roof. Filtering to a single level gathers every discipline for that floor in one place — handy for a floor-by-floor review or a level-specific package.
Document type
Tags like Detail, Schedule or Diagram let you pull all of one kind of document together regardless of discipline.
When to Use a Group vs a Tag
- Use a group when a drawing clearly belongs in one place, and when you want to share by discipline — group-level sharing lets you give someone every Structural drawing without exposing the rest of the project. See Share Levels.
- Use a tag when the same drawing needs to appear in more than one view (the cross-trade example above), when the label changes over time (status), or when it cuts across disciplines (levels, document types).
Related: Organising Drawings with Groups and Using Tags.