Importing DWGs just makes me depressed.

[Greg_at_ils]

I continue to get frustrated with this process and I'm not sure that there is a good answer.

I just received a folder of DWG files from my client. Each DWG file has about 3 Xrefs give or take. The files are simple and small 2D drawings. When I go to import the folder into VW it works for about 3/4s of the files. The remaining files don't import with their Xrefs and one file comes up as incompatible so it doesn't import at all. When I open these suspect files in ACAD 07, they all open just fine. I even purged and resaved them but the problem still exists. The only solution I can find is to bind the Xrefs in ACAD and then import them into VW.

Unfortunately, I don't find this to be a sustainable solution. I certainly can not ask my client to spend their otherwise billable hours binding Xrefs just for me in each file of their drawing set every time they issue a set of files. In this case, there are over 30 files and I would not consider that a large number. This forces me to maintain a license of AutoCAD to deal with this as well as any issues exporting to DWG which I will not get into now. That makes my license of VW very expensive and I often wonder why I bother. For fast and complex projects I often find myself just working in ACAD to avoid these issues.

I wish there was a better way and I'm not sure there is an answer for this but I guess misery loves company.

[Ray Libby]

File a bug and include the files that are not working. There is a link in the upper right of this page to Bug Submit.

I don't have the behavior you are describing and the only way it can get fixed is if NNA knows about it and can reproduce it.

[Greg_at_ils]

I did submit a bug report. I'll report back with what they say but I was hoping someone else had some ideas.

[Ray Libby]

Thanks.

[Greg_at_ils]

Just when I thought it could not get worse it did. After playing some more with these ACAD files I realized that the person who made them used a feature in ACAD that allows you to crop an Xref like we crop a viewport. So in each file he duplicated Xrefs and cropped them in different places to create his details. These details are lined up next to each other in the file which means that all of the stuff that was cropped out is piled on top of each other. Well VW does not recognize this cropping and imports all of each duplicated Xref in the file resulting in tons of geometry overlapping which creates a big mess. Fortunately each Xref comes in as symbols so I can select each set and drag it away from the others. The caveat is that now you screw up the sheet layer.

This just makes me crazy. I get a new set of files each week and will have to do this. I should have just used ACAD from the start and I think that now on I will for anything that requires a lot of backgrounds.

[tekie]

I am currently importing DWG prints of our building and am running into the same issue where the Xref is not cropping as it does in the ACAD file. I am trying to stay away from rearranging all of the prints for the building and creating new veiwports for each detail. Has anyone found a solution to this?

[Dom9362]

Hi Iskis and Doubledge

You could try putting each of the xrefs on a separate design layer through the object info palette and then using the viewport layers pane to show each layer only within its corresponding crop. This would save moving the xrefs around and having to subsequently edit the crop. If you right click on the viewport and go to edit design layer this will then only show a single xref on its separate layer with no overlapping plans

Dominic