Layer names sort order - adsk got it wrong again

[BorisVian]

In all "what's new in v2014" articles one can read about the new so called natural sort order of layer names.

That claim would have been justified if any zeroes in the layername were validated.

Have a look at the jpg in attach.

Can we expect a patch for this any time soon?

My customers are already making remarks about it.

How difficult can it be to sort a list correctly?

I remember that in v2009 the sorting of layernames was different in the ribbon-pulldown than it was in the layermanager.

When I made a remark about it at the Paris Tech Camp, adsk had the nerve to say that this behaviour was "as designed"...

Cheers, from a rather disgruntled support engineer.

[heinsite]

It certainly isn't the way Microsoft Excel might sort... but there is a simple work-around:  Just add a value so all layer name have the same number of digits.  You can't have an A-01 and an A-011 and get a useful sort.  But you will get what you want with an A-010 and A-011, etc.  

It will have to do until you get your hotfix I'm afraid.

Dave.

[BorisVian]

Thanks for the swift reply Dave.

The layernames in my screenshot are according to the SfB coding system (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_13567)

In v2013 acad sorted the layers correctly (see attach) so why change it?

It's not as if european architects and contractors will be adopting a new standard just because someone at adsk decided on a new sorting method (the logic of which eludes me).

So I would advocate strongly to reinstate the v2013 layer sorting, or at least provide a variable that offers the choice between sorting methods.

Please?

Cheers,

[heinsite]

If I had to guess I'd predict a lot of people are going to be frustrated by this and agree with you.  Then the question will become only how long it will take the Autodesk coders to get to a solution.  Autodesk administrators are always on this forum so they will take note of this, confirm and report it.

Dave.

[jggerth]

Also, look at the upper right of this page for a 'Contact Us' link.  That's another route (possibly more direct) to push feedback to Adesk.

If you are working with a reseller, I would presume that they have their own channels to Autodesk as well.   the more places you can point out the problems, the more likely it is to get noticed.

Sometimes louder is better (doesn't seem to work with fixing the borked Help though....)

[Anonymous]

Adsk ignores national CAD standards?

This is quite a problem, for years now companies and national institutions have been developing standards, and in the building industry in Europe a lot of those have chosen to work with 'SfB'-coding. This is not something you can turn back just like that. Can Adsk come up with a variable or some patch so we can dis- or enable this way of sorting plz.

a frustrated cad (standards)-consultant, tech engineer, trainer

[dgorsman]

Lets say they adopt "European standards".  Whoops - I'm not in Europe.  That applies to lots of people.

I'm not certain how the sort method an in-application display of the layers is going to start throwing critical NCRs (non-conformance reports)...

[dgorsman]

Louder is better, as in many voices; NOT a couple of people screaming in AutoDesk's collective face...

[jggerth]

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@dgorsman wrote:

Louder is better, as in many voices; NOT a couple of people screaming in AutoDesk's collective face...

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agreed - and thanks for stating it that way < i didn't mean to sound trollish> the volume needs to come from a plurality of voices

There is a use case for a hierachical layer manager.  It appears that most if not all advanced layer naming conventions  are essentially hierachical in nature.  NCS as an example, uses multiple  hyphen delimited fields, where the level of detail increases as the field number expands.  A-ANNO essentially 'owns' all architectural annotation, whether that's dimensions (A-ANNO-DIMS), notes, (A-ANNO-TEXT), or titles (A-ANNO-TITL)

A layer manager that took advantage of that, and utilized a tree structure, would be incredibly useful in consolidating the visual clutter of either the current or classic layer dialog, and let people working on comples jobs using advanced layering standards drill down to what they wanted more effectivley.

Whether Autodesk does it, or a 3rd party developer jumps in, doesn't matter - as long as someone does.

[rkmcswain]

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@jggerth wrote:

There is a use case for a hierachical layer manager.  It appears that most if not all advanced layer naming conventions  are essentially hierachical in nature.  NCS as an example, uses multiple  hyphen delimited fields, where the level of detail increases as the field number expands.  A-ANNO essentially 'owns' all architectural annotation, whether that's dimensions (A-ANNO-DIMS), notes, (A-ANNO-TEXT), or titles (A-ANNO-TITL)

A layer manager that took advantage of that, and utilized a tree structure, would be incredibly useful in consolidating the visual clutter of either the current or classic layer dialog, and let people working on comples jobs using advanced layering standards drill down to what they wanted more effectivley.

Whether Autodesk does it, or a 3rd party developer jumps in, doesn't matter - as long as someone does.

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I'm not disagreeing with you, but in the meantime you can sort of mimic that style of layer managing using layer filters.

I don't remember the exact version, I think it might have been LDT2008, but this *was* built in to the layer manager. If you had NCS type layers, it would build the layer filter tree for you. I think it was part of ADT and they left it in that one version by mistake, because it didn't last long in LDT.

[dgorsman]

*yoink*  Grabbing that idea for some of our work.  Our layers aren't even close NCS but are still organized where some preset filters would work well for the users.

[BorisVian]

Oh, did I mention that the layersort in the LAYWALK and LARMRG dialogs is still "old style"?

I attached screenshot showing both together with the layer mangler manager.

I really DO hope we'll get the old style sort back in v2015.

Cheers,

[doni49]

I saw your first image and I'd have to say that it DOES look natural.  The problem is that what you're looking to do doesn't follow natural.  Meaning that it looks like it's seeing the numbers and comparing them numerically.  031 EQUALS 31 and both would naturaly come AFTER 04.  That's why they called it "Natural Sorting". 

Having said that, I don't think I like "Natural Sorting" for layers.

As to the suggestion of putting zeros -- he did and it still shows like this -- it's dropping the leading zeros and comparing the remainder of the "number".