Tags linked to Lights discontinue 'linking' until CAD is restarted

[dtiemeyer]

I have a bit of a weird one here. I have Light Fixtures as devices and I have a Tag that displays the 'ID' as shown in the 'Design' tab of properties. After several hours of work my electrical engineers will experience a condition where the tags no longer refelect the changes made in Properties. If a new light fixture is placed after this condition occurs, then the tag displays the 'default' value that the tags block attribute default was set to.

Restarting CAD and reopening the drawing will cause all the tags to work correctly again. This tells me the drawing is not the issue, but the underlying code is getting broken somehow.

Has anyone else expereinced this?  it seems to be only my electrical users, does anybody know if the code that runs the tag association is based on .NET or something else drawing data from a pool in Windows as opposed to its only memory space like the rest of AutoCAD? Might one of our (independent of CAD) lighting design software's be causing this crash in AutoCAD?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

AutoCAD MEP 2011 w/ all service packs

[Joshua.Benoist]

The model may just need to be updated.  At the command line, type in OBJRELUPDATE, enter, enter again to select all and update. 

Joshua

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[dtiemeyer · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately that does not fix it. That command does not work after this high level failure occurs. I shouldve mentioned that in the original post. Thanks Joshua.

[Joshua.Benoist]

Oops, I was going for the reply button and clicked the Accept As Solution button.  I'm still here though.  So you mentioned some 3rd party lighting tools.  Tell us more about them.  Does this issue occur on new drawing files?  Is it specific to these files or this project?  What happens in files where you have not yet used the 3rd party lighting apps?

Joshua

[dtiemeyer]

The problem is sporatic and not reproducable, and I am not certain it is a 3rd party software, its just a hunch. The only time my users mention it is in lighting plans. And usually they are running lighting calc software simultaneously. I thought if this 'tag updating' was running off some microsoft .net or other shared dll's that one of the other programs might be making calls to a similar library and screwing things up. Ive seen it before, but I'm not sure thats what is happening. Any suggestions would be great.  AGI is the one that seems more commonly in play when this error occurs.

[Joshua.Benoist]

I have not seen this issue before, not here in support.  So it may be unique to that AGI software.  Our property sets and palettes do use xml and .NET pretty heavily.  It's entirely possible.  Maybe someone else out here in the forums has some experience with the AGI and similar 3rd party lighting apps...

Joshua