Project Standards not updating

[J.A.Mounteer]

My division of our company has been in the process of developing and moving to project standards for our drawings. During this process we have developed standard walls, display reps, doors, windows, etc and a standard project template.

Now that we have our styles drawings finalized, we can't get the "Synchronize Project Standards" option to work. When selected, AutoCAD will show the command in the command line but do nothing. I can manually drag the correct styles from one drawing to another but that seems to negate the whole point of such a command in the first place.

It has been suggested to combine all the styles into one large drawing, but that also seems less than ideal. The system allows multiple style drawings and later on there may be projects where we only want to change the door styles from standard but maintain the same wall, door and property sets.

Such a solution doesn't address this next problem, either. When the project is synchronized with the standards several items will never update from the standards when flagged with "Update from Standards." These include Property Sets and formats and Display representations and sets.

Uninstalling and reinstalling both ACA and the Cad Manager tools has done nothing to fix this problem. Does anyone else have suggestions or ideas as to what might be the problem?

[J.A.Mounteer]

I've managed to fix the problem with the property sets and display reps. It was one of those simple, "Why didn't I think of it sooner" issues: The items that weren't updating didn't have a version set in the standard drawings. So now all AEC items are updating properly within the project.

However, I still can't get the standard drawings to sync with each other. Any ideas on what might be wrong would still be appreciated.

Thanks!

Ed: And of course in both posts I forgot to mention I'm using ACA 2008 with SP1. Edited by: J.A.Mounteer on Sep 21, 2009 1:32 PM

[Anonymous]

I don't think that's possible. It would be really nice if it were,
because it would allow me to split my standards drawing out by type
(wall, door, etc.) and be able to keep the display system updated across
all drawings. The display system is really the only reason I have them
all in one drawing.

J.A.Mounteer wrote:
> However, I still can't get the standard drawings to sync with each other.

[J.A.Mounteer]

I figured out a work-around for this recently. I created a project called "Cad Standards" out of our standards folder. I edited the project attributes so that "Elements" points to the Styles folder and "Views" points to the Details folder. Sheets doesn't point to anything different, but I've got that option if I need an additional folder, now.

After that I loaded each of the Styles drawings as an element in the project, and set the project standards to point to their respective element drawing. Now the project standards will synch with each other, so I don't have to have a single drawing for every ACA item. Walls have their own styles drawing, separate from doors and windows, which is separate from tags, property sets and display settings.

I've also been using this project to build the tool palettes I export into catalogs. This saves me the problem of having to keep a second profile around with editable palettes if the tools change or need updating.

Comments welcome if anyone knows a better way of handling things, or more I can do with it. Edited by: J.A.Mounteer on Nov 20, 2009 9:27 AM