Mac 2012 Cross platform Xref problems

[HawkAIA]

Several problems with xrefs in Mac r2011 were documented at http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-for-Mac/xrefs-on-network/td-p/2829641.

r2012 has definitely addressed the issues, but we still are having problems.  I created a support case, but also wanted to document my testing here, in case anyone else is experiencing similar issues or could add to the discussion.

In my discussion, I refer to a file that has been attached as a reference in another file the "Xref."  I call that other file into which the xref has been attached the "Discipline sheet."  For example, we will draw the geometry of a floor plan, or elevation, or building section, and name it something like "Floorplan_Xref."  Then we will attach that file in many architectural, civil, mechanical, electrical drawings which have names like A101, E201, etc.  We call those drawings the "discipline sheets."  It is a pretty efficient way to work and allows multiple people to work on a project at the same time. My office has multiple licenses of both the windows and mac versions of Autocad, and the reported behavior is not isolated to any one user, but appears across all users in the office.

With XLOADCTL set to 2, if a Windows user has an Xref open, when a Mac r2012 user tries to open the same file, the Mac user will receive a warning message and the Xref will open on the mac user machine as read only, which is the expected behavior.  Thank you very much, Autodesk programmers, for correcting this problem from r2011!!

However, the reverse situation does not work correctly.  If a mac user has an xref open first, and a windows user opens a file which references the xref (a discipline sheet),  the Windows user receives an error message that the attached xref file could not be located, and the discipline sheet opens without the xref being displayed at all.  If the windows user has a discipline sheet open, and then the Mac r2012 user opens the xref, the windows users machine is not adversely affected, and the windows user can properly reload the xref even after the Mac r2012 user opens the xref subsequent to the windows user opening the discipline sheet.

When a windows user has an xref open, sometimes the Mac r2012 user will only be able to open discipline sheets as read only.  Restarting the windows machine sometimes appears to eliminate the problem.   In one case, after the Mac user chose to go ahead and open the discipline sheet as read only, the windows user's machine locked up with a fatal error.

We will keep trying to do more tests.  It looks like xrefs are getting better.  The big problem is that if a mac user has an xref open first, the windows users cannot open any discipline sheet that has attached that xref file without receiving an "xref not found" error.

[Anonymous]

John - any recommendations?  We have a cross platform office, and it's a big problem.

[HawkAIA]

Right now, my only suggestion is to tell people that they are going to actually have to get up and talk to each other about what files they are working on. In extreme cases I have had to tell people to copy files to their desktop and work on them locally instead of from the server.  In that case you have to really be careful. If I accidently overwrite your file sending it back to the server, it is bad.  But if you overwrite mine, you're fired.  🙂   It hasn't been an insurmountable problem for us, because I have fewer mac acad users than windows.  If it was all mac, it would be a major annoyance.  Hope that someone from Autodesk reads this forum and tells the programmers.  If you're on subscription, log a bug report and tell them to refer to this forum.

I installed Lion Server on a mac mini as a test and the file locking is definitely more sensitive than on Snow Leopard Server.  I'm still working with the Lion Server.  I'll keep trying.

[ericechols85]

I'm not sure if this is a viable solution in your situation, but our company has been using Dropbox as our 'fileserver'. We use a master account to share a folder (or entire directory) to all other users. So, essentially, we are indeed creating local copies of the file at all times, but they remain in sync as soon as the user hits 'Command-S' (or CTRL-S respectively). Then we get the standard 'An xref has been updated, please reload' message and things go on as anticipated. We have users running both Mac (2012 and 2012LT) and Windows (2012) ACAD. This honestly has been a great solution for us as we all typically work remotely anyway. It is much more efficient than using VPN to a fileserver. Revit however is another story...

[HawkAIA]

That would work unless you have two people working on the same xref, constantly saving over each other's work, with the last save the winner.  "Oh, you were working on the xref, too?"