Company MEP catalogs Network located and read-only

[mdhutchinson]

What are the Pros and Cons of having network located company MEP Catalogs set to Read-Only?

The only con I can find is that the user cannot regenerate the catalog.

Is this a valid arg for leaving it Read-Only?

[Keith.Brown]

I myself prefer to leave them read only also.  This will stop cold anyone trying to add to the catalog or making changes that does not have the access rights.  I have run into to many incidents where someone has gone in and changed a key parameter because they were not sure of what they were doing.  Or worse yet, delete something accidently.  I think the added protection outweighs catalogregen not working.  You can easily get around that by restarting autocad.  If a key change was made to a catalog, an email could be sent out instructing employees to restart autocad mep or a message could be sent out through the communications center saying the same thing if you happen to use that functionality.

[mdhutchinson]

Work-a-round for catalogregen not working... restarting AutoCAD works?

I want to copy over new mvpart content to another office... I thought about only copying over only the bmp, xml and dwg file. But to incorporate the new file a catalogregen would have to be done... right?    This wouldn't work to tell the users just to close a restart AutoCAD?  Would it? 

[Keith.Brown · Accepted solution]

Someone that has access to the catalogs will of course have to regen them first.  I am assuming that whoever will be responsible for adding new parts will do this.  If you use content builder or the catalog manager they will update the catalog xml file when you add new parts.  In this case the catalogregen only needs to be done in order to add the new parts to the in memory representation of the catalog in Autocad MEP.  Restarting Autocad MEP will accomplish the same thing as it will reread the information from the xml file.

If you add parts to your catalog by just dumping the xml, dwg, and the bmp into the desired folder then the catalogs will have to be regened by the catalogregen command.  This will make sure that the correct information is added to the catalog apc file.

This is the behavior that I have noticed when using catalogs.  I could of course always be incorrect. 🙂

I do know for a fact that if it is a networked catalog and at least one person regens the catalog (the person with read access) then all others will only need to restart autocad mep to get the new information.

[mdhutchinson]

Thanks confirmation... this is as I thought.