Being Civil

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014 New Feature: Round-Tripping Data Between AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 and 2014

One of the cool new things in Civil 3D and other AutoCAD based programs is the ability to, how we call it, "round-trip data" between different versions. If you remember, it was said numerous times before that Civil 3D is not backward compatible program, meaning that the drawings once saved in a new version were automatically upgraded and there was no easy way back. Now this is about to change. The reason I did not want to mention it earlier in our introduction to Civil 3D 2014 is that it comes with some caveats. Please be patient.

This (long) post will try to describe the behavior of certain features when an AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014 drawing is edited and saved in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 and then subsequently re-opened in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014.

AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014 New Feature: Data Shortcuts

One of the new features I'm positive you will like it is the ability to share referenced objects. How many time it happened that you received your drawing to realize with missing references? Too many times, I suppose. Well, in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014, the behavior of data references for object types (except for surfaces) has changed! When you insert a reference to a data shortcut into a drawing, and then you save and close the drawing, the object is now saved in the drawing. This was not the case before, as you remember. Now, if you re-open the drawing that contains the reference, the reference is only validated and synchronized if the source object has changed.

To demonstrate this I created a brand new drawing and then referenced EG surface and a couple of alignments for other drawing. Notice them all listed in Data Shortcuts node and in Prospector.

Now, I saved it all and e-mailed this drawing to myself to be opened on other machine. Once I opened it I was able to see my 2 alignment ... and they do show up as Alignments, but you will also see that they are coming from Data Shortcuts and that I may be asked to synchronize (note that yellow exclamation point there suggesting that the object may be out of date).

The exception are, as noted before, surface objects, due to the potential size of the surfaces. Since synchronization only occurs if the source object changes, an object in a drawing that relies on a data reference is only marked as outdated when an actual change to the data has occurred.

So this way it is much easier to share your drawings with references than ever before-even when source drawing is not available. Same will happen if you open your 2014 drawing in 2013 version. Cool stuff, huh?

 

Hotfix - AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 Data Shortcuts

Just released is a new Hotfix that is meant to address issues some have you may have been experiencing with creating Data Shortcuts:

In a continued effort to improve product quality and stability we are releasing this hotfix for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 all languages. This hotfix will address the following issues:

This hotfix resolves an issue were a user is asked to save a drawing before creating a Data Shortcut, then saves the drawing, retries to create the Data Shortcut but is again prompted to save the drawing.

Please make sure you have applied Update 2.1 prior to applying this Hotfix. Follow this link for download and instructions: http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=DL20311889

 

Cannot See Data Shortcut's Descriptions

Now that it seems more and more users are using Data Shortcuts, it makes perfect sense to give you more information about what is going on with some files. I have received an issue where one of our customers could not see the description shown in the Set Data Shortcut Folder dialog. For all of you working in production and having years’ worth of work stored in your project directory, it makes whole lot of a difference to have description listed next to the project.

Here is what happened. Customer had descriptions showing in his XML files that are in charge of storing these descriptions. If the file ShortcutsHistory.xml is opened with browser or XML Notepad this user could see the descriptions but just could not see them in the dialog. I have to admit it, was pretty puzzling to me too, since all permissions to the files and folders were showing properly. With little help of Eddie Ng, our developer, I was quickly able to find out the missing piece.

From Vault to Data Shortcuts v2.0 (2012 Version)

If you are one of the regular readers of Being Civil you may remember the question how to move from Vault projects into Civil 3D Data Shortcuts. Another situation where similar workflow may be useful would be if one user or contractor doesn’t have Vault but would like to get data out of it. Roughly a couple of years ago I wrote a post From Vault to Data Shortcuts. With the introduction of other flavors of vault you have learned that some things will not work the same way as before for several reasons that are behind the scope of my intent to share this with you. Main one is that the project.xml file that used to store information about Vault project is not used anymore.

Obviously, this made the first post about moving to Data Shortcuts obsolete for 2012 version. With great help of Rob Todd, a long time Autodesk veteran, I am about to share a revised workflow or “From Vault to Data Shortcuts v2.0” with you. As always, Thanks, Rob!

Here is what we need to do. Let’s imagine that we don’t have Vault and have no plans to have it, but our Client is using vault for storage of their projects and we are craving for their data.

Within Vault there is a functionality which allows exporting of Vault project to ZIP file. Simply right-click on project name will give the option. So now, that ZIP file went through the Data Superhighway and reached us. To summarize:

From the Civil 3D 2012 and Vault AEC Collaboration/Professional/Workgroup 2012 environment:

1. From Civil 3D 2012, export the Vault 2012 project to a ZIP file
2. Send the project ZIP file to the non-Vault environment

This is where the real workflow begins…after the jump.

Drawing Cannot Locate the Project

One of the most entertaining features for me in Civil 3D are certainly Data Shortcuts. I like the fact that they are very useful, but because they can be easily broken if not played with properly, they are fun to troubleshoot. This may sound strange, but I find it cool and challenging to look for what may be broken. Data shortcuts are, as the name suggests just shortcuts to the object residing inside of other drawings. This is where similarity with XREFs stops, so don’t expect them to behave like XREFs. They may be other similar things but I would stop here.

Data shortcuts, unlike full blown XREF, which links the drawing with another drawing, could pick one or more objects from other drawings and allow you to insert them into your main drawing utilizing different styles. One thing that’s often a misconception is (and believe me I have seen my share of questions about it) that once they are in the main drawing they can be manipulated as they were part of the drawing. NO - These are references from other objects residing inside of other drawings. If you were to open a data shortcut XML file, you would see that there are only a few lines in it basically stating little more about object and the drawings from which they are created from.

The data shortcut XML file…could not be updated

 

Data shortcuts are becoming more popular with every new releases. With more flexibility added and abilities for drawing to “memorize” project association and data shortcuts, it’s no secret why it’s becoming more popular. I wrote about that in my 2011 Preview article New Commands in Civil 3D for Data Shortcuts. For the most part they are easy to use and very smooth and easy to understand. But seldom there are some issues that may cause some confusion.  For instance we had few reports of an error when customers try to create data shortcuts: ”The data shortcut XML file <path>\<filename>.xml could not be updated because it is in use by another application”. This sounds more serious than what the really is. There are three scenarios known to me (there may be more) when this error occurs.

One is that the shortcut path size exceeds maximum character limit of 256. Keep in mind that mapped drives are calculated as full path. For instance if you have C:\Projects\Civil Projects\2010\ mapped as M:\ drive this path would have 32 characters… You get the point.

Other possibility is that some of your objects have some special characters in the object name. Most likely this is caused by the object name having a “<” or “>” symbol in it. If this is the case, rename the object and try again. For these situations we released a TS15113067.

There is also a possibility that the issue may be permission related, since the message (unable to update) you are seeing indicates it. To see if this is the case you may try to create another directory next to the troubled one (same level) and see if you then can copy data into it. Another good thing to try is to see if your administrator can access or modify these files? In rare cases the issue may be caused by permissions of the WAN replication software.