XREF labels disappearing

[seattlesurvey]

I have read a few posts about others having this happen.  I'm trying to get a handle on what should and should not be expected to work as far as labeling XREF'd entities goes.  I'm using 2011.

I have recently had bearing notes associated with an XREF'd line disappear, and I can't pinpoint the cause.

I had edited a couple of lines in said XREF'd drawing, but NOT the one that was associated with the C3D notes.  There are two C3D drawings that XREF this drawing and that have line labels applied to the same, unchanged, line.  Yet, all of those labels were gone (in both drawings) when I opened them this morning.

So, should labeling an XREF'd entity work?  Are labels predicably lost when a labeled line undergoes a known set of modifications (Sinc relayed his experiences here:  http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/Xref-labels-not-dynamic/m-p/2886718/highlight/true#M1...

What if the XREF'd drawing is simply saved, with no changes made to a labeled line?  Should that be okay?

If labeling XREF's is known to be unpredictable, it sort of puts us back to manual text labels and manual curve tables.  Is that really what people are having to do?

Thanks for your comments.

[Anonymous]

So a Tech from Autodesk called. I was able to walk him through the issue and he said only 1 other person has reported it and it was reported as a Parcels-only issue. He was able to recreate it using just polylines and he was going to explore other situations where it might occur like Alignment Tables, etc.

He suggested if any of you have Subscription that you open a case file and report the issue. The more users that report the issue, the higher it becomes in priority. He also said there is no timeline for the issue to be resolved.

For now he suggested 2 workarounds in addition to the "DO NOT RELOAD XREFS" option:

  1. Label inside the Xref file on separate layers.

  2. Copy the linework to your current drawing.

Not very clean workarounds, but at least he was helpful.

Jim

[seattlesurvey]

Thanks for following up Jim.  I will ask our CAD director to open a case file.  We have probably all considered those work-arounds as well (I know we have);  they are non-starters that would negatively impact our efficiency and work-flow (not that this issue doesn't!).

Thanks again.

[Anonymous]

Just an update, installed SP2 for Civil 3D 2015 and the bug still exists.
 
The Autodesk Tech did say that it was too soon to hope to see a fix added to the service pack.
 
But why can't they issue a HotFix??? This bug means a loss in productivity.
 
Jim

[mikekillion]

We too are experiencing this issue. We just rolled out the 2015 deployment and applied Service Pack 2. We're running Windows 7 64-bit workstations. 

Mike Killion

[Anonymous]

This problem still exists in the SP3 patch for 2015 version.

[Cadguru42]

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@Anonymous wrote:

This problem still exists in the SP3 patch for 2015 version.

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I wonder if this is related to the XREF targets issue in 2016? http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-civil-3d-general/c3d-2016-corridor-targets-problem/m-p/5654254 That case was never actually solved. It was sent to development as a defect. Perhaps Autodesk tried to fix the XREF labeling issue and broke the corridor function in 2016?

[Anonymous]

Using 2015.  We have been experiencing this problem since going from 2013 to 2015.  I concur that the issue seems to arise when introducing table tags/tables into working drawing.  The problem occurs regardless of whether parcels are being used or not. 

For weeks I had a drawing where I annotated boundary lines in the working drawing.  Yesterday, I created table tags for the curves and then got the "warning - run recover" alert message.  When I reloaded the xref and working drawing this morning, all of the annotations attached to the source file are gone.  I had been of the thinking that this was only a problem using parcels, but this project does not have parcels so it confirms that it is a glitch stemming from table tags.

We are preparing to deploy 2016 and I hope this ongoing issue is addressed soon.  We have multiple users here that have all encountered this problem.

-Heath Galloway

Survey Technician

[Anonymous]

We have the same thing, but it's only happening on one system.

I can open the dwg's in question on my system and it doesn't happen.

We are Running C3D 2015.

Here is what happens to us....

Have a dwg with tags, tables and lines in an xref labled.

We have a site map xrefed in.

Change the location of this xref and when you save you get

Drawing Has Errors, Run Recovery (Something cclose to that)

It saves ok but when you open labes to lines in a different xref are gone.

Did a clean install of C3D today and it didn't help.

This may be a long shot but what video cards are you all using.

The system with issues has a AMD FirePro W2100

My system (laptop) has a Nvidia GPU.

Bo

[lstarbird]

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@Anonymous wrote:

We are preparing to deploy 2016 and I hope this ongoing issue is addressed soon.

-Heath Galloway

Survey Technician

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Just curious if you had a chance to deploy & test if this is still occurring in 2016? We're on 2014 & have recently lost days of work due to this issue.  Thanks!

[lstarbird]

I recall that we opened a case with AutoDesk back in August about this issue.  This was the convo:

AutoDesk: "There is a known issue with labeling xref objects so if it ever
was changed in anyway it can lose its connection to the label. Which
from what I can see is the is issue. If you notice after running recover
the table doesn't completely disappear the header stays there and when I
did it L32 was still in the table. I am unable to fix this issue but for
the future it is best not to use the xref labeling capabilities, yes
they work but they often loose there connections to the xref, if the
files is moved, renamed or detached."

Me: "To confirm, does that mean they should instead label directly on the object in the
drawing that the object is live in? Is it safe to assume that goes for
all types of labeling in Civil 3D, not just lines & curves that may be
added to a table?"

AutoDesk: "Yes this is for all objects. However I want to be clear you can label with data shortcuts just not XREF's. for some reason the XREF's can loose there association very easily and you can't get it back. I hope this helps."

Just curious, I didn't get a chance to ask him, but how would we label data shortcuts?  Sorry if it's a dumb question.  I'm in IT...not so much production.

Thanks,

Lena

[Anonymous]

Update:

This issue did not happen on every pc.

So......

On the 1st PC to really see it, I put in a new SSD boot drive, reloaded windows 7, upgraded to windows 10,

installed C3D 2016, Problem Solved.

Your Mileage may Vary 🙂

Robert

[lstarbird]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Update:

This issue did not happen on every pc.

So......

On the 1st PC to really see it, I put in a new SSD boot drive, reloaded windows 7, upgraded to windows 10,

installed C3D 2016, Problem Solved.

Your Mileage may Vary 🙂

Robert

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This is VERY exciting news! 🙂 Just curious, what are the hardware specs on that workstation?

[Anonymous]

As Rock Motherboard

I5 Something CPU

8 GB Ram (This is a 3 year old PC)

AMD Workstation Video Card, It was about $200 mid range card

Samsung 256gb 850 EVO SSD

Boots to windows in about 15 seconds.

All files stored on a Dell Server running Linux

One of my guesses is that it may have to due with some sort of 

runtime library that gets installed on a fresh install but doesn't get updated

if it's already there.

[Anonymous]

I'd like to add that C3D 2015 and below will not load on Windows 10.

I do have a way to load LDD 2002 but we won't go there now 🙂

[Anonymous]

Re: installing C3D 2013-2015 on Windows 10, you can you just need to make sure Windows is updated with KB3081448. See Autodesk Knowledge Article on the subject.

[Jared3424]

We are on C3D 2016 Sp1 on Windows 7 and the problem still exists. 

[Anonymous]

If you notice above I solved the problem 🙂

Either install a new HDD (SSD Definetly) or wipe the existing instalation

and start from a FRESH OS install.

The issue has not come back.

Bo

[Goody1977]

So, Adesk is not going to resolve the problem for Windows 7 running Civil 3D 2015. 

You would think $8000.00 would get you more than this mediocre service. 

Thanks Adesk, I hope you can see my middle finger from here!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just spend half a day to whole day rebooting your machine. Real good solution. 

[baldema]

I am currently experiencing this issue and have been considering using data shortcuts in my working dwg instead of relying on faulty labels that link back to the source xref. I typically only apply tag labels to centerline alignments so I think this will work well for me but I see the downfall to using data shortcuts for other entities like parcel boundary. Thoughts on this approach?

[Anonymous]

We have found it's safer to work with lines in the drawing.

When we need a line and don't want it plotted we put the line

on a layer set to not plot and the label on the normal label layer.

You have to do it this way because if you freeze a layer the label

associated with that layer will not display.

Good Luck.

Bo