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All Lighting Symbols have lost Data -Was Missing Inventory


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OK, so seems the problem is that all the symbols in my plot have lost their associated data. If I take a unit out of the resource browser and drop it in the plot, it's reading as world based - every instrument. I tried dumping all prefs and rebooting, reinstalling serial number - no change. Solutions?

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FYI - I sent my plot to support, who returned it to me with symbols restored. Seems there was a corrupt symbol with no data. Even though the list of symbols returned - Lighting symbol maintenance now shows all the symbols in the plot - all data for each symbol is gone. I've heard this is a thing with v2016 - it deletes the data associated with the symbols. It seems 2016 wants all lighting symbol names to begin "lighting insert" and all accessories "lighting acc" I had to go thru and replace all symbols with symbols from the new 2016 library. Would have been good to have some shortcut to do this, or at least a heads up on the problem.

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And now wondering, how can a light have 2 classes - all my units are in both class "Lights-Instruments" and the new "Lighting-Incandescent" turning one class or the other off, and they disappear. In the Object info, they still say

they are assigned only the original class - Lights-instruments.

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I answered over in controlbooth as well

A hyphen in a class name makes for an indented sub class. "Lighting-Incandescent" and "Lighting-Fixtures" will both show up under a "Lighting" header where hierarchical displays are possible. Setting the header to On/Off/Gray will affect all those classes.

Symbol sub classes are not available in the OIP, they are baked into the symbol. Recent libraries have been made this way and I personally believe it is a major mistake! The goal is to be able to turn parts of a symbol on and off, like door swings and label legend tags. There is some control over default classes in Document Settings, but only for whole objects.

There are 2 ways to deal with it if you hate it as much as I do. #1 Delete the sub classes and when the dialog asks about the objects in that class select 'None' or the class you prefer. #2 Rebuild all your libraries. (use method 1, but now they use many files per vendor so it's still some significant work.)

There is much talk of this here in the Vectorworks forums. Some sort of default class import control will likely be in 2017, if you can wait til Sept or Oct.

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It seems 2016 wants all lighting symbol names to begin "lighting insert" and all accessories "lighting acc"

With all due respect to Tech Support, I think you might have been given some bum info regarding a theoretical naming convention. As long as you follow overall VW naming constraints (like, no duplicates), names of Lighting Device Symbols is pretty irrelevant with regard to maintaining data. More-than-likely, you did have some corruption, somewhere, that, by coincidence, swapping in different Symbols rectified.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

The question and answer was a little confusing to me too so I talked to tech support.

It appears that the user ran the "Lighting Symbol Maintenance" command can clicked "Remove Unused".

This is designed to remove the record information from lights not currently used in the document. The user is presented a confirmation dialog detailing what will happen if they click OK.

No corruption, no naming restrictions.

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And now wondering, how can a light have 2 classes - all my units are in both class "Lights-Instruments" and the new "Lighting-Incandescent" turning one class or the other off, and they disappear. In the Object info, they still say

they are assigned only the original class - Lights-instruments.

The symbol itself can be assigned to a class, and objects within the symbol can be assigned to a class. If everything within the symbol is assigned to the "Lighting-Incandescent" class, and the symbol itself in your drawing is assigned to the "Lights-Instruments" class, you will see the behavior you are describing.

I make all my own lighting device symbols, and almost never use the default ones. All of my symbols use the same classes within the symbol, and all of my symbols in the drawings are in the "None" class unless I need to change their visibility for some reason.

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