Wall Styles conversion ACA 2009 to ACA 2010

[ra]

We have numerous custom wall styles created in ACA 2009 can we use these ACA2009 walls in ACA2010 and if we do use the ACA2009 wall styles will the walls not clean-up correctly and have problems in addition to cleaning-up with ACA2010 walls?

[david_peterson]

As long as you upgrade the file (templates) to a 2010 format you should be ok.
I don't know that you even need to do that. The only time you may run into an option is when you have a very old wall style that may not have all the properties built in to it hence you'd have to add them. I don' think Adesk has made any real major changes to the way in which the program handles wall styles.
Just like just about anything else in Cad, you can just about always go forward, you just can't always go Back.

[dkoch]

I am not aware of any added functionality/changes in setup for Walls that would create a problem for 2009 Walls in 2010. If you have highly customized your Display System with respect to Walls, you may need to bring those customizations forward into 2010. But there have not been any wholesale changes in Wall Component priorities, or new features added to Walls/Wall Components that you would need to set on your 2009 styles. If your 2009 Wall Styles followed the Wall Component priorities that the 2009 out-of-the-box Walls Styles used, you should be good to go.

If you plan to migrate to 2010, but not all at once, I would recommend that you make a copy of your 2009 Wall Style source file(s), then open and save it(them) in 2010 to create a 2010 source file. That way you will still have your 2009 source file in the 2007 file format, with a reduced chance that it would be opened/modified in 2010 and made unusable in 2009 and earlier. You would have to recreate any tool palette tools for 2010, pointing to the new file, but, in my opinion, that is worth the effort to keep the two file formats separated. You probably could reference the 2009 format file from 2010, but I am not certain that if you opened it in Style Manager in 2010 and made any changes that it would not promote the file to the 2010 format. If you have a lot of Wall tools, you might be able to create a 2010 version more quickly by copying the 2009 catalog/palettes to a different folder for 2010, and then using an XML editor to replace all of the paths pointing to the 2009 source file with paths pointing to the 2010 source file.