Construct Renaming/Repathing Broken in 2006 and 2007

[Anonymous]

I just wanted to make everyone aware that Project Navigator's
renaming/repathing of constructs was fundamentaly broken in the upgrade from
2005 to 2006, and remains broken (I believe) in 2007. Renaming and repathing
a construct in these versions will cause the lose of layer states in any
view and sheets that make use of this construct, potentially resulting in
lots of time spent going through and fixing all the views and sheets
manually.

The trouble lies in repathing behavior that Autodesk changed in 2006. In
2005, repathing a project after renaming a construct would cause Navigator
to look for any instances of that constructs in the views and sheets and
rename the xref's path to the new name; The reference name for the xref
would be left untouched. In 2006 this behavior was changed so in addition to
correcting the xref's path, Navigator now changes the reference name. With
the reference name changed, AutoCAD treats the xref as if it were new,
loosing all xref layer states in that view or sheet and reverting to their
states in the Construct. Navigator either needs to include additional code
to preserve layer states in these situations, or revert back to the 2005
behavior of not renaming xref reference names during repathing.

David Kurtz on the ADT support team confirmed this behavior and added:

"There is no work around for this I'm afraid and hotfixes effecting behavior
change are not considered by development (unless they cause program
crashes)."

Autodesk needs to understand that loosing all the layer states on a large
project and having to go through and fix hundreds of drawings has FAR more
impact on a company's bottom line then the program crashing and losing (at
most) a day's work. Not acknowledging this as a hotfix worthy bug would be
downright irresponsible on Autodesk's part. My hopes with this post are to
perhaps avoid someone learning about this the hard way, and also to perhaps
put some pressure on Autodesk to fix a critical feature which is now
critically flawed.

-Chris

--
"An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys."

Christopher Shoemaker
Electrical Engineer
Lizardos Engineering Associates, P.C.
200 Old Country Road, Suite 670
Mineola, NY 11501-4207
(516)-484-1020

[Anonymous]

I feel the layer states approach has been flawed since Day 1 of PN. I gave
up on trying to get my XRefs to display reliably, and went back to using
code that I wrote 10 years ago to "correct" display.

--
R. Robert Bell


"Chris Shoemaker" wrote in message
news:5412498@discussion.autodesk.com...
I just wanted to make everyone aware that Project Navigator's
renaming/repathing of constructs was fundamentaly broken in the upgrade from
2005 to 2006, and remains broken (I believe) in 2007. Renaming and repathing
a construct in these versions will cause the lose of layer states in any
view and sheets that make use of this construct, potentially resulting in
lots of time spent going through and fixing all the views and sheets
manually.

The trouble lies in repathing behavior that Autodesk changed in 2006. In
2005, repathing a project after renaming a construct would cause Navigator
to look for any instances of that constructs in the views and sheets and
rename the xref's path to the new name; The reference name for the xref
would be left untouched. In 2006 this behavior was changed so in addition to
correcting the xref's path, Navigator now changes the reference name. With
the reference name changed, AutoCAD treats the xref as if it were new,
loosing all xref layer states in that view or sheet and reverting to their
states in the Construct. Navigator either needs to include additional code
to preserve layer states in these situations, or revert back to the 2005
behavior of not renaming xref reference names during repathing.

David Kurtz on the ADT support team confirmed this behavior and added:

"There is no work around for this I'm afraid and hotfixes effecting behavior
change are not considered by development (unless they cause program
crashes)."

Autodesk needs to understand that loosing all the layer states on a large
project and having to go through and fix hundreds of drawings has FAR more
impact on a company's bottom line then the program crashing and losing (at
most) a day's work. Not acknowledging this as a hotfix worthy bug would be
downright irresponsible on Autodesk's part. My hopes with this post are to
perhaps avoid someone learning about this the hard way, and also to perhaps
put some pressure on Autodesk to fix a critical feature which is now
critically flawed.

-Chris

--
"An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys."

Christopher Shoemaker
Electrical Engineer
Lizardos Engineering Associates, P.C.
200 Old Country Road, Suite 670
Mineola, NY 11501-4207
(516)-484-1020