SSM padlock icon

[neilyj666]

Opened up Civil and started drawing 1, the opened up SSM and one of the drawings has a padlock - which it presumably shouldn't?

This sheet set is not publishing as a whole set, I have had to right click each sheet and publish each one to PDF. If I attempt to publish the whole thing it hangs at 008 (with the padlock) but doesn't seem to have plotted the sheets 001 to 008 as they are not in the target folder.

Is this Sheet Set corrupted beyond repair?

thanks

Neil

[rkmcswain]

Even on valid, good sheet sets, I've noticed the plot files (whether they are PDF, PLT, DWF) do not show up in their final location until the publishing action is complete for the whole SS.

[Jeff_M · Accepted solution]

When you hover the mouse over the sheet in SSM it should tell you "Currently open by: Joe Drafter" If you know it's not open, look in the drawing's folder for any dwgname.dwl or dwl2 files and remove them.

[rkmcswain]

DWL and DWL2 files have nothing to do with file locking or SSM. They are only used by whohas.arx.

[Jeff_M]

Randy, I had a drawing open which has 3 Layouts associated with my SS. I copied the dwl & dwl2 files to another folder, closed the drawing and those original 2 files went away, as expected. Refreshing the SSM also removed the locks from the Sheets. I then copied back the 2 files, dwl & dwl2, to the original location, whaere the drawing they were referring to is now closed. Refreshing the SSM once again placed the locks on the 3 SS sheets. Deleting the 2 files once again removed the file locks.

[rkmcswain]

Interesting. I had a padlock today show up on a drawing that I knew was not open, and voila, there were the DWL and DWL2 files. I deleted them and refreshed the SSM and just as you say, the padlock disappeared.

Having said that, I strongly suspect that the authors of the SSM are simply reading the DWL/DWL2 files to identify who has the file open (a process which is full of holes since the files can be deleted or even created at will). I still say these files have nothing to do with file locking. I could have easily opened the "padlocked" file for WRITE regardless of the presence or absence of these two files.

Ref: 

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/File-lo...

Thanks for following up, as I was not aware that SSM was reading these. 

[neilyj666]

Thanks Jeff - padlocks have now gone...:)

[rkmcswain]

After further review, it seems like the SSM method of checking for the presence of the DWL/DWL2 files is actually a pretty reliable method for determining if the related DWG file is indeed open.  The DWL/DWL2 files cannot be deleted while the file is open in AutoCAD (at least not without manually releasing the file lock from the O/S). 

The downside is that if AutoCAD crashes, the DWL/DWL2 files remain in place and unless you manually remove them, SSM will see them the next time that sheet set is loaded and SSM will think they are still open, when if fact they are not.  I'm not sure why this would hang up the publish process though, since I publish sets all the time while other people and myself have sheets open.

[neilyj666]

Even after deleting the dwl/dwl2 files I still couldn't publish the Sheet Set and had to open the dwg file for each sheet and print from there - only 12 sheets but a bit tedious and unnecessary with a sheet set 😞