Drawings suddenly and unexpectedly being made "unavailable for processing" [AutoCAD Electrical 2020]

[Anonymous]

Win7, ACADE2016, recently migrated.

We had this problem sporadically in 2014.

but now in 2016 it has become a substantial problem.

While editing a drawing that requires the ACE to go to a child/parent/footprint and update it I will get this error message:

I have the files checked out, but they still cannot be edited.

I have to restart autocad to get access to the files again.

I had just restarted, edited a component, and before it could even go to the other drawings to update them, it has locked them from me.

Why?

What can I do to stop this from happening?

[rhesusminus]

Did you resolve this? It would be nice to know how, for later...

[Anonymous]

started getting the same errors today. Would love to know what causes this. 

[Icemanau]

Check these likely causes...

1 - Someone else has the dwg open.

2 - ACADE does not have full access for the folder where the files are located. Both Win 7 and Win 10 are known to randomly change access levels on users as updates come through.

3 - If using Vault, not all the dwgs have been checked out.

Let us know if you have still have problems after checking these.

Regards Brad

[Anonymous]

I think it has to do with running project wide tools.

[Anonymous]

The problem has subsided for the most part. All the drawings are local. I don't see how the settings would have changed. If I just send it to task then run the task it works fine. It is a weird problem to pop up on local files. 

[Anonymous]

I have had this issue as well with 2016 and now 2018. The only thing that ever fixed it was when I had to do a clean install, but it came back after a month or so.

What seems to be happening is AutoCAD forgets where the project database is and then you can't do anything with it. The only fix I have found is to close and re-open AutoCAD.

[aknewhope]

I was having the same issue with ACE 2023 and it turns out it was the overall length of the names of virtual folders was over some length which caused this to happen. I have many folders used for organization and I had created some with very descriptive names. It seems the script doesn't like this. All I did was rename the virtual folder to something shorter and it was fixed.

Nevermind. It seems to still be present. Still investigating the cause.

Update 2: Alright I figured it out. So, when running a project wide utility, and selecting the drawings using the subfolder filter, if you have a folder with drawings and subfolders in it and you select both the folder and the subfolders contained within, ACE attempts to process the same drawings multiple times and in turn throws this error.