Help-Strange Stair Behavior - almost 100 duplicate

[Jeff Prince]

A client and I have been working developing a BIM model of a 2 story home.  Over a month ago, we placed a stair PIO on the ground floor and configured it to show on both floors.  Wow, that works great.

 

Fast forward to today.  The stair on the ground floor is fine and it appears graphically on the second floor correctly, which is a separate design layer.  However, we discovered that there are nearly 100 duplicate objects on the 2nd floor depicting this stair now, all nicely stacked on top of one another.  The OIP does not identify them as stairs and simply reports a quantity of the duplicates, even when only one is selected.  I can not think of how this happened, as the stair exists on the ground floor only and was never copied to the second floor.  This is reminding me of the site model contour label problem when Vectorworks magically stacks 100s of duplicate labels on top of one another.

 

Have you experienced this?  Does anyone know why or how it occurs?  How can it be prevented?

 

[Christiaan]

I experience this often, but not 100 duplicates, usually 1. I delete them when they appear. Sometimes The original is gone and is just a dumb object but that used to happen more often in the past.

[Jeff Prince]

@Christiaan Thanks for the info.

I looked at the archives for the project and could see these copies steadily increasing over time.  I wonder if the duplicates are created when features adjacent to the stairs are updated or if fitting walls to the stair object creates this situation as those are the only things I can think of that accelerated the rate of duplication towards the end of the project.  We were doing a lot of fine tuning to those adjacent features, but not the stairs themselves.

[Stefan Bender]

These "duplicates" are probably duplicates of proxy objects of the stair. A proxy object is some sort of slave object of a stair on another layer. This proxy object is created if option "Include top graphic on upper floor" is checked in pane "2D Graphics". If such a proxy object is duplicated by some means (which should actually be prevented by Vectorworks), the duplicate is some sort of orphan and might show unexpected behavior.

[Christiaan]

Yes, that's what these objects are Stefan. Stairs have been doing this in our projects for as long as I can remember.

[Stefan Bender]

This not something the stair itself can control. It is up to the various duplication routines to prevent the creation of these sort of zombie objects. If you can reproduce the creation of these zombies, feel free to submit a bug report.

[Christiaan]

Yes, the problem with this bug is that these duplications happen without noticing, until later. Sometimes I would find them the next day, knowing that they weren't there the day before, but not knowing when they appeared or what triggered it.

Edited April 23, 2021 by Christiaan