Master Xref

[Anonymous]

Good Day Team, 

I am after a bit of information from people with first hand experience. 

I am working on a large road project (70 plans at a scale of 1:1000) and to save a bit of time with draw order scripts and potentially adding in extra references down the track I have suggested having a single "master" reference per package. In which I'll have on average 10 references Attached. And have that single "Master" reference overlaid in each drawing. 

I have used this method once before with no issues, but it was on a comparably smaller project (around 8 plan sheets per package) 

After suggesting the master reference solution, one of the engineers said they had tired the "master reference" before on another project but had issues with references not loading in properly due to the project being large. Has anyone had the same experience? Or would it have been an error with the drafting? 

We are using AutoCAD 2019

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

>> had issues with references not loading in properly

What does that mean? He did not see it at all, or just partially, he has got error messages, AutoCAD crashed, ...?

- alfred -

[RobDraw]

One bad project does not necessarily mean the workflow is faulty. I've only used that approach a couple of times myself but it works.

[timothy_crouse]

The term "Problem , Slow Loading"  is a relative term:

1. Was the load happening across a network?

2. How long ago was this problematic situation?  Hardware is pretty fast these days?

3.  What is the shape of your group drafting environment?  Do you have fast network connections.

There should be no reason you cannot do a test run in a short period.  It will either confirm the drafing environment is lacking or is now up to par to work with large XRefs.

NOW. . . I will point out that working on files creeping over 5meg gets to be frustrating when you are woking in them day in and day out.  Keeping file size 4meg and less keeps them pretty lag free.  An minimize the use of arrays as they seem to use up machine resources as the screen in pan'd and zoomed.  e.g. a 300 cabinet data center created with array rows or a grid is laggy when all the parts of the drawing are brought into play.

IF you can keep your master XRef small in size it will help the situation.  A 40 Meg city map as an xref would be laggy.

I worked on a highway project that had an xref that spanned 300 square miles (approximately).  We were able to keep it speedy by breaking it up into sections, I think they were 75 mile grids.  It worked good for us and that was 10+ years ago.  BUT the file sizes were not extreme,  I did a lot of work changing out line work with different drawing objects to bring the file size down.  The less objects you have the better.

LAST TIP . . Avoid nested XRefs.  Just load what you need other wise you have yet another maintenance task dealing with freezing and thawing layers for various viewports.  Not worth the trouble.

Best Regards

-Tim

[Anonymous]

See that is the thing, I don't know exactly. He said that it just didn't print. If he wasn't able to see it in the drawing that could have been due to a reference in the master being overlaid, Or if it was on a non-plot layer in the master by accident, it would display but not printed out. 

I was given very sparse information on why it didn't work. The experience I have had with it was fine. 

Hopefully I'll have some time between projects to run some tests. 

[Anonymous]

Yeah, that is what I am assuming. 

There are several things that could have gone wrong. Overlay instead of attached, xref on a non-plot layer, annotation for text references maybe? No idea. My own experience on a tender at the beginning of the year it worked flawlessly.