Improvement to maintain manual edits for Isometric drawings

[jason.drew]

Isometric drawings generate a new DWG each run so you lose the previous manual edits, comments, attributes and clean-up changes. It would be great to have a way to maintain these changes.

Suggested by: M+W Group

[dgorsman]

Traditionally this has been done by transferring everything on a specific layer (or level, for uStation users).  Thats poor drawing practice as it requires pretty much all annotation to be on the same layer; I'd prefer a method that either isn't bound to a single layer, or at least can specify multiple layers to copy across.  A data flag (or absence of a flag) to indicate entities to copy/not copy into a new run would be a means to accomplish this without restricting users to specific layers.

I don't think there is any practical way to copy forward manual changes to automatically generated iso content (valves, etc.) without getting into all sorts of problems.  For example, a high-point valved vent (olet-nipple-valve-plug) was moved slightly on the isometric to make room for a manual note; later, it was removed from the model entirely.  If the previous iso contents are copied forward the valve is now on the iso even though the model is different.

[RSFAdsk]

One of the features added to 2016 was the ability to save split points into the model, with the idea that you could reliably assume that small changes in the model are localized to a single sheet.  This is not the level of control that you are asking for, but I wonder if being able to select an existing production ISO dwg in project manager and "Update only this Sheet" would help with this problem?

If we know that we are updating an existing drawing we might be closer to supporting a flag as you suggest.  So what might happen is for a particular existing ISO sheet, you could flag manually added notes as "Copy to New Iso if Updated".  Components I can see being tricky because the geometry will change slightly, but possibly something can be done with their annotations.  One question I might ask is how important do you think it would be to reserve space for manually added and flagged objects?

[thebearjed]

this is the Holy Grail of isometrics. have been deciding between manual editing or re-running the iso for revisions for years.

9 times out of 10 it takes longer to re-run it and do all the clean up. we almost always end up doing manual edits.