Lost Geometry + Inactive Groups?

[hkellyMLT6P]

Hello!

I am new to FormIt, and realized appeared to lose about an hour's worth of modeled geometry. I thought that I may have accidentally deleted it; however, extensive use of the undo buttons (or Ctrl Z) did not bring the various geometries back. I opened the Undo Manager, and discovered that most of the geometry that I had recently modeled and then grouped was shown under the "Inactive Groups" with no apparent way to restore/re-activate those groups. So I guess I have a few...possibly-related questions:

1. Is there a reason/scenario that Undo/Ctrl Z would not bring back a modeled element/geometry?

2. What are inactive groups and how does something become "inactive?"

3. Is there a way to recover/re-active an inactive group?

Unfortunately, I closed the file and re-opened to see if there was a visibility glitch or something, and I think that wiped the inactive groups from the file.

System Info:

FormIt for Windows v.17.4.0

Windows 10 Pro

Thanks!

[lucdoucet_msdl · Accepted solution]

Sorry to hear that you’ve lost some work , the  same happened to me when I first started using Formit with only an intuitive understanding of the workflow.

1. Yes there are different scenarios in which ctrl-z will rollback to previous states. To understand why, you have to know that Formit saves the editing history  of the main model and separate histories for each group.

https://windows.help.formit.autodesk.com/tool-library/undo_manager

 It’s therefore important to remember where the geometry you want to recover is located with respect to the parent group. Undo within a group will rollback the local edits to that group while undo’s to the main model will affect only the instances of a group.

2. My understanding is that inactive groups simply groups that have been deleted from the model and have no instances in either the main model or nested in other groups.

3. No, unless the Formit developers have a sneaky scripting command that can access them. @josh.goldstein has mentioned in a previous post that it is not possible.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/formit-forum/purge-inactive-groups/td-p/6579094

The only luck I’ve had is to save separate copies of my AXM files periodically and extract an older version of the group in order to bring it back in.

If your network drive or Windows has file versioning enabled (not a Formit function), you may be able to use the technique above.

Regards,

Luc

[josh.goldstein · Accepted solution]

Hi @hkellyMLT6P,

Thanks for trying FormIt out! Echoing @lucdoucet_msdl, we're very sorry you lost data. This is something we work hard to prevent. Here are some answers that might help:

1. As Luc mentioned, FormIt features a unique Undo/Redo system. If you're editing a nested Group, Undo/Redo only affects that Group. This is particularly useful if you make a change inside a Group, then make a ton of other edits in other Groups, then return to the first Group and decide you want to Undo... you can Undo that specific change in that Group with just one Ctrl + Z, without Undoing all the other things you did elsewhere, which technically came after the change you want to Undo. On the flip side, if you exit all Groups to the Main Sketch, Undoing from there will act more like traditional Undo/Redo systems, allowing you to Undo any change from any Group, based purely on chronological order. So you can still execute a "global" or "time-based" Undo from the Main Sketch. You have options!
   
   To answer your question specifically, if you're editing a Group, and you want to Undo the deletion of a Group that happened somewhere else, you'd have to either  1) go find the "parent" Group where the deletion took place and Undo in there, or 2) exit all Groups to the Main Sketch and try Undoing until you get the Group in question back, or 3) use the Undo Manager in Windows, which is great for visualizing the Undo/Redo history stack in all Groups. You can look in there for the Group inside which you deleted another Group, and you should be able to roll back to get the deleted Group back. Again, if you find the Undo state in question, you can roll this back without affecting other Groups, which is pretty sweet. 
2. Inactive Groups mean Groups that were either deleted by you explicitly, or Groups that once existed, but whose creation were undone via Undo. 
3. The only way currently to restore an Inactive Group is to Undo their deletion, or Redo their creation, by taking one of the paths I outlined in #1. 

You're also correct that once you close the FormIt file, all Inactive Groups are deleted as part of file cleanup and memory management, just like your Undo/Redo stack is deleted too. Inactive Groups only stay around in memory during the FormIt session, in case you use Undo or Redo to bring them back. Note that there's an option in File > Export -> AXM where you can "Include History", which will keep all Undo/Redo states, as well as their associated Inactive Groups, in the file for the next time you open it. This causes the file size to increase, since we're saving a lot of data that would otherwise be deleted, but it could be useful if you ever want to maintain the ability to restore deleted geometry or have Undo/Redo stick around for longer than one session.

By the way, thanks to your post, we noticed an issue with Redo from the Main Sketch. Remember, Undo/Redo from the Main Sketch (not inside a Group) should act like a chronological Undo/Redo system. But in a complex model with many nested Groups that each have Undo/Redo states, Redo may not actually Redo the change you expect, forcing you to Redo multiple times to get to the change that should have been first. We're fixing this! It could have contributed to your experience, but it's hard to know for sure.

We're also adding your feedback to the request to allow restoring Inactive Groups from the Undo Manager, without having to Undo/Redo to get there. 

Thanks again for reaching out. Your feedback makes FormIt better!

[josh.goldstein]

Hi again @hkellyMLT6P 

We fixed the issue with Redo potentially re-doing operations in nested Groups in the wrong order, as well as other issues around Undo/Redo. The fixes are available in v18, which just got released. Read about it here, or get the update now.

Thanks,