I am DONE with REFEDIT!

[hencoop]

I have been having a relatively good experience with REFEDIT... until yesterday.

REFEDIT had been fraught with problems for me until AutoCAD C3D 2017.  I had begun trusting it again.  Until yesterday, I had not seen any problems in AutoCAD C3D 2019.  Then disaster struck.  I tried to REFCLOSE/Save after making edits and it refused.  I could not do anything but REFCLOSE/Discard.  Today, I opened the file that I thought I had lost all of my edits to yesterday and they were all there... editing as I had intended... or so I thought!

It turns out that ALL of the layers in this drawing now had the name of the file that it was attached to during my REFEDIT session as a prefix and separated with a vertical bar just as if they were Xref layers in the current drawing and belonging to the file I was in when I used REFEDIT yesterday.

I learned this after I ran Audit on the drawing (which is standard practice after I PEDIT/JOIN polylines because that INVARIABLY will cause errors in the drawing... most often in the Layer table.  AutoCAD repaired all of the layers by changing their names to:

AUDIT_I_180615103116-0

AUDIT_I_180615103116-1

AUDIT_I_180615103116-2

...etc...
AUDIT_I_180615103116-116

Not cool Autodesk!

Now I go get my backup file and NEVER use REFEDIT again.

[tcorey]

Autodesk will definitely want to take a look at this problem. Sounds scary.

As a work around, use Open Xref instead of Refedit.

[dgorsman]

Hang on a minute... were you using REFEDIT on an XREF, or a block?  Despite the name I've *never* used it on an XREF (only on blocks), and it's never let me down.

[hencoop]

@dgorsman
I always use BEDIT on blocks and sometimes I use REFEDIT on Xrefs... if they are very simple and contain NO C3D objects.  Using REFEDIT will also cause WIPEOUTs in blocks that are inserted in the refedited file to have their DRAWORDER moved to the front.

Otherwise, I open the Xref.     I use the OPEN command to open the file that is xref'd within my own custom routine which records some things and posts them to the bulletin board so that I can zoom to the exact window area and optionally the same viewtwist of the view I was in when I asked the routine to open it... and it offers to reopen the drawing I came from when I'm done (I always use SDI=1).  It handles specifying the xref path and return path so I don't have to do any of that navigation.