A random person walks into a doctor's office saying “Doctor, please help me…I think I’m dying!”. Doctor confusedly says, “What makes you think that?”. The person continues, “I don’t know….but whatever I touch with my finger hurts… No matter where I touch.... I touch my head and it hurts, I touch my leg and it hurts, I touch my knee with finger and it still hurts. Please help!” The doctor, old school troubleshooting guy, immediately said,” I believe you broke your finger”. OK...now back to the Civil world.This is one example of good troubleshooting performed by this doctor.
Often when working with files we tend to forget to start with basics. When one drawing goes through the endless network of engineers, contractors and drafters who then attach or remove references, templates, blocks, etc. the drawing is often “infected” with some unwanted data such as duplicate objects, objects that are leftovers from erased objects, zero length objects, etc. It is not uncommon that in many drawings you could find lines or objects that sits on top of each other. Most of us are familiar with commands such as RECOVER, AUDIT, –PURGE, PURGE, SCALELISTEDIT, OVERKILL, etc.... but in most cases Map Cleanup Tools are overlooked. This tool can be found in tool-based Geospatial workspace (Tools ribbon>Clean Up) or simply by typing MAPCLEAN.
As good practice I would advise you to run these commands as soon as you receive your drawing or start working with them so that you can check the integrity of your drawing as well as to remove some unwanted content and ultimately make your drawing size smaller.
If you type MAPCLEAN in command line you will be greeted by this dialog. Here you decide how to apply your cleaning filters.
Then after next you will get some additional queries which you can apply more precisely. Keep in mind that each selection has additional and different Cleanup Parameters option which lets you tweak removal options even more precisely.
The final step is to decide what to do with found “offenders”.
In command line program will display how many of the objects satisfying the criteria you selected are found in the drawing. I bet you will see some and it is not uncommon to see tens of thousands of these objects in your drawing.
I certainly hope that this post will remind you to run this command on your each drawing and that you would be able to remember the doctor from the first paragraph when troubleshooting?
Enjoy this post? Here are some more Troubleshooting Guides.
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