Dimensions Delete Themselves

[jbinterZKU3Y]

I have an issue with dimensions outside of a model in place family deleting themselves when I copy or mirror elements inside the family. I do a lot of custom cabinets so for example in a kitchen I dimension all the cabinet boxes, but if I go into the family and copy one of the boxes I receive a message that "One or more dimension references are or have become invalid." even though the elements they are dimensioned to have not changed. It doesn't seem to matter if they are dimensioned to reference lines or the pieces themselves, they are still deleted. If I create the element new from scratch the error does not occur, but it would be much faster if I could use copy. Does anyone have info on why this happens? Any info would be helpful. Thanks.

[Sahay_R]

Try this. 

1) Make your in place family a group. Give it a name

2) R>>SaveAs>>Library>>Group

3) Save the Group that you have just created to an RFA

4) Drop the resulting family into your project

Using families does provide more stability to the health of the model. As far as possible, I make it a practice to avoid in-place models. Good luck!