You created custom subassemblies, managed to add them to your tool palette and the tool palette to the catalog. You even went as far as publishing it to you network to have it available for your office buddies. But when the first colleague tried to use it, program did not do anything even though the user was prompted for insertion point and you saw little glyph indicating you are dragging your assembly.Let’s see what could be wrong and how to fix it.
Little background information first. When you create your custom assembly by dragging it from your drawing into your tool palette program basically created a new DWG file called the same way as your Assembly. That drawing was saved in the following directory (if tool palettes paths are not pointing to the same location). C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Assemblies.
Publishing a tool catalog to a network location will allow multiple users to link to the tool catalog. If the tool catalog on the network changes, the users’ catalog libraries will be automatically updated.
The most common issue when sharing assemblies is that DWG files are not copied on the location where program is looking for it. Each person wanting to access this assembly needs to have this drawing file accessible whether they pointed to the shared directory or their individual Assembly folder. So, the assembly must be there for program to use it. Just to quickly demonstrate the issue (in pictures), I have created an assembly called TestAssembly and added it to my Tool palette. I also checked my C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Assemblies directory and confirmed that the TestAssembly.dwg file exists in there. So far so good.
To fast forward …I have also created a new Catalog (CONTENTBROWSER) and added this assembly to it and published it. Then I went to my other machine and imported the catalog and saw my TestAssembly in it, which I added to my tool palette by drag and drop. It looked something like this.
When trying to add this assembly from my tool palette to my drawing the issue occurred. Nothing happens when the assembly is inserted into drawing. Why?
If you remember the note about background and open the C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Assemblies (new machine) you may immediately see why. The TestAssembly.dwg is not there. So all I needed to do is to copy my drawing file from my first machine and past it in there.
This time the assembly showed up.
I hope this helps a little.
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