can't locate surface data reference (.xml) file

[glacoste]

my colleage that is on holidays right now sent some civil 3d drawings that contain data references to another office and they are having broken reference issues with the surfaces. I opened the drawing in our office and the surfaces are there and showing the data ref symbols in prospector but when i look through the data shortcuts folder below in prospector the surfaces are not there.

how do i locate the .xml files or if they have been deleted how do these surfaces appear in my drawing.

thanks,

Gerry

[Jay_B]

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@glacoste wrote:

I opened the drawing in our office and the surfaces are there and showing the data ref symbols in prospector but when i look through the data shortcuts folder below in prospector the surfaces are not there.

how do i locate the .xml files or if they have been deleted how do these surfaces appear in my drawing.

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Right click on Data shortcuts and "Set working folder"

The working folder is 2 folders above the _shortcuts folder

In our environment the working folder is set to \cad\ (see below)

\cad\civil 3d\_shortcuts

As far as the other offices having issues, they will need to have the working folder set properly as well.

(They will have the best success by having the entire folder structure your office has mapped as same drive letter).

Then (assuming the Data shortcuts were ok to begin with on your end) they shouldn't have any issues with broken references etc.

Worst case scenario, depending on how badly broken these data references might be you may need to look into "repairing Data Shortcuts" using the Data Shortcuts editor. But start with the easy stuff first.

[Anonymous]

How do you change the working folder to look 2 deep?

[Jay_B]

Dave,

I should have also mentioned we use a Data Shortcuts "Projects Folder" whiuch is "Civil 3d", so when we set the Data Shortcuts working folder as "Cad", the _shortcuts folder is created within the project folder. There may be multiple ways of setting this up but we always set it the same on every project. Maybe someone can set me straight on this if we are just doing more of a std. practice vs. required mapping for _shortcuts folder here?

[glacoste]

Thanks for the response Jay but i have the folder set and the pipe network and alignments appear in the shortcut folder but the surface folder is empty. My question is where is my surface .xml file because the surface shows up in prospector as a referenced surface. I dont know if the surface .xml file is stored in another directory, how do i locate it?

Gerry

C3D 2012 SP3
Win 7 Professional 64 Bit

[Jay_B]

Open the _Shortcuts folder, in the Surfaces folder, do you see xml files here with the names of the surfaces your expecting to see in prospector Dref surfaces listing?

[glacoste]

no the surface folder is empty

[Anonymous]

My guess is the surface you see is just a surface snapshot, but I have very limited knowledge of snapshots.

[Jay_B]

Stating the obvious but if your certain there were Dref'd surfaces, then you definitely have a problem to sort out.

You could take a look in the the External Data Shortcuts Editor but I'm not sure you'll see surfaces there either if not in the same_shortcuts folder.

[glacoste]

yes I was thinking there's something wrong too. the surface isn't a snapshot because in the prospector the surface "og" has the reference symbol next to it. For some reason the .xml file is not in the folder. Now can i go back in the surface drawing and create a new data refence of "og" or will that mess up with my pipe networks.

Gerry

[troma]

Go to prospector, select "Surfaces".  All the surfaces get listed in the window below.  Included in the list is the source drawing for data shortcutted surfaces.

[troma]

Do the surfaces appear to be working fine in your drawing?

Or is the reference broken?

If it all fine you can promote the surfaces (perhaps copy your drawing first).  If you send out a drawing with the surfaces promoted, they won't be missing anything since it doesn't depend on shortcuts anymore.

[glacoste]

yes i see the source drawing in the window below. the surfaces are working fine for me the problem is the drawings and reference files were sent to another office and now they have broken references over there. i guess i could promote it and re-send them.

i was just looking for a better solution. i was hoping that civil 3d could somehow locate the .xml file for me if it is in another directory somewhere.

but thanks for all the feedback.

Gerry

[Jay_B]

Might want to be careful about the promote thing if it's round tripping back to your office etc. and project isn't 100% complete as it defeats the purpose of Drefing in the first place IMHO.

I often copy projects off outside office servers locally and as long as the c3d folder structure is maintained (very hard to explain at a keyboard) I've never had an issue with Drefs flaking out on me.

Example x:\client\proj#\cad\civil 3d\ shortcuts\ locally can be my docs\temp\cad\civil 3d\ shortcuts\

I'm not suggesting this as a workflow as I do this for support purposes but rather trying to shed some light on what works for me here. Caveats to this obviously apply without understanding your workflow and folder structure. That's why I originally mentioned (They will have the best success by having the entire folder structure your office has mapped as same drive letter).