Dynamic Blocks & Scaling prompt/pull down

Anonymous · ‎07-30-2015

Sorry this may be a little long winded but here it goes.

I just started getting back into Civil 3D after a long hiatus of being out of the engineering business. I am a novice with Civil 3D but I have been making good headway. I recently got a new job and replaced another drafter who was apparently a 'CAD genius'.

Here is my scenario. The 'CAD genius', whom I never met nor have spoken to, had set up a tool palette with some custom dynamic blocks (a concept that is new to me and I just recently learned about) that are used to show various symbols on our plans. When inserting the blocks, I would click on whichever block I wanted to use and it would automatically pop up with a pull down menu asking me to select the scale of the drawing that block would be appearing in. The options in the pull down included various scales (1"=10', 1"=20', etc.).

QUESTION 1 Is this pop up pull down menu with the scales that appears after selecting a dynamic block something that is within the AutoCAD software or a custom prompt made by this other drafter?

QUESTION 2 Does anyone know what I am speaking of and possibly how to recreate this?

PROBLEM I recently edited one of the dynamic blocks and added a new visibility state to include an additional component/option in the block. I used block editor and it told me that it had authoring elements and I said yes/ok. I made my edits saved the block and went on my way. The issue is that now when I select any of the dynamic blocks from the tool palette, it no longer pops up with the scale prompt but rather this message appears "Warning and error occurred during save. We recommend that you run RECOVER on the drawing".

It doesn't seem to affect the drawing that I am inserting the block into so I'm not so much worried about that. But I would like to get the dynamic blocks to operate properly with the scale prompts again. I am just not familiar enough with dynamic blocks or this scale prompt to figure out how to get it to work again. Google has not been much help in this case.

I am hoping that someone with more experience here in the forums knows what I am talking about regarding the scale prompts and might be able to help me get the blocks working again. Unfortunately, I did not think ahead and didn't make a copy of the blocks before tinkering with them. The save/recover warning seems to me like it has more to do with the dynamic blocks and less to do with the drawing I am inserting them into. One, because the error message comes up when inserting these dynamic blocks into any drawing and two, the error message pops up instead of the scale prompt and I feel like the scale prompt has something to do with it. What I find odd is that I only edited one block and now several of the blocks come up with this error message. I am honestly at a loss, hence my message! PLEASE HELP!

tyronebk · ‎07-30-2015

Right click on one of the blocks in the palette and look at its properties. You should be able to tell if it is calling a custom command or directly inserting a block. Based on your description it is almost certainly a custom command being run to insert the blocks. You can preset dynamic block values in tool palettes but I don't believe prompting the user to select values when inserting is available out of the box (I may be wrong though).

Depending on how the custom command was written, you may need to edit the command to work with the new visibility state of the block. That's tough to say without looking at the command code. The errors you are seeing may have something to do with the custom command or there is the possibility that the block has become corrupted when you edited it, potentially causing problems when that block is accessed.

You might get better feedback if you post this question in the AutoCAD forms since this question involves standard AutoCAD behaviour with nothing specificly related to Civil 3D.

Anonymous · ‎07-31-2015

@tyronebk wrote:
Right click on one of the blocks in the palette and look at its properties. You should be able to tell if it is calling a custom command or directly inserting a block. Based on your description it is almost certainly a custom command being run to insert the blocks. You can preset dynamic block values in tool palettes but I don't believe prompting the user to select values when inserting is available out of the box (I may be wrong though).

Depending on how the custom command was written, you may need to edit the command to work with the new visibility state of the block. That's tough to say without looking at the command code. The errors you are seeing may have something to do with the custom command or there is the possibility that the block has become corrupted when you edited it, potentially causing problems when that block is accessed.

You might get better feedback if you post this question in the AutoCAD forms since this question involves standard AutoCAD behaviour with nothing specificly related to Civil 3D.

I did right click on the block in the tool palette but I didn't find anything there that indicated a custom command. I feel like I have combed through the various properties pretty well but I could have missed something. In any case I took your suggesation and posted this in the vanilla AutoCAD forum also.

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Dynamic Blocks &amp; Scaling prompt/pull down