AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

Just wondering if anyone else has come across this, but lately we've noticed an issue that sometimes occurs in our office.  While working in a drawing xrefs that are attached to that drawing are getting saved "behind the scenes" by AutoCAD.

Specifically one instance was a user changed his working annotative scale while in model space, and this caused all of the attached xrefs to re-save themselves (you could watch the files update in Windows Explorer).  He did not save the drawing he was in, just changed the annotative scale.  This is worrisome in that we are still between 2011 and 2012 on some projects and I'm worried that a user opens a drawing from a 2011 project in 2012 to look at something and in the background even though he doesn't save that drawing, the base xrefs will get updated to 2012, forcing an unplanned version upgrade for Civil 3D objects.

Anyone else witnessed this or can explain this behaviour?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

It's a known "feature" but I haven't seen it documented. If you have an xref attached that contains annotative features and the "Automcatically add scales to annotative objects..." option is turned on those scales will automatically propogate to xrefs (and saved) that are not set to readonly if the scale in the active file is changed.

[#3]

Thanks Mike!  I was able to recreate it as you described.  At least I know what to warn users about now to avoid the issue.

Chris Welk

Urban Systems Ltd.

[#4]

This behavior is downright dangerous and should be addressed immediately. Has anyone notified support about it?

[#5]

I've seen this also - and blamed other users, the IT department, Windows, Novell, the virus scanning software and who knows what all else for messing up drawing files because there was supposedly no way that the AutoCAD software should be doing it.  I couldn't even guess how much time and money we've spent trying to diagnose what was going on.