Round tripping a DWF file

[greg.mcdowell]

I need some confirmation on a problem that I'm having round tripping DWF files in 2010.

Exporting the DWF file from Revit, marking it up in Design Review and linking it back into Revit works well. And when I make changes to the markup (changing status or adding notes) and re-export the DWF (being sure to include element properties) the changes are reflected in Design Review.

This all works rather well going back and forth between Revit and Design Review multiple times. The problem comes when I try to save Revit. I get a "Cannot Modify Imported File" dialog where Revit tells me the file is read only or already in use. But it's not. DR is closed and the read only switch on the file is not selected. I've even gone so far as to delete the file to see if I get a different warning (I don't).

I've done some searching but have seen very few references to this problem so either a few of us are just making a series of dumb mistakes or nobody's trying this workflow.

Am I chasing a ghost? Is this just not working yet even though the Revit help menu says it should (I know - occasionally the help menu and the application are out of sync)?

Any help, guidance or clarification would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Steve_Stafford]

I heard anecdotally this week while visiting with a client that they are having some round trip issues but those were based on 2009 and they were asking if those were "fixed" in 2010. Sounds like they may not. Perhaps Nick will see this and weigh in.

[crawfords]

The lack of functionality for this has reallly been disappointing. I've had this problem happen any number of times. Another issue I've encountered is Revit not correctly exporting status changes to the markups in the DWF set. Autodesk really needs to take a closer look at these problems.

[jsnyder.68308]

We had a similar problem caused by version incompatibility in the Design review application. If somone with Revit 2009 and DR 2009 has a DWF markup link in a Revit file that was saved in DR 2010, then comment status updates to the markup in Revit won't be saved back to the DWF in a fashion as noted above.
This is a long way of saying that all machines in the DWF workflow need to have the same version of Design Review if you want to round trip the comments. There may be other issues going on here, but I confirmed this one in our environment today.

[jeff.livingston]

I am also wondering why the color of the dwf markup does not change in Revit when I change the status in Revit to "done"?

The preferred convention for me would be that the markup would change to a yellow highlighted color when the status has been changed to "done".

Am I missing something here?

I am assuming I would have to open the dwf file, and highlight it there, and then reimport to Revit to accomplish this?

I would love to hear other experiences with using design review.

[Brockway]

We have finally (and through a LOT of headaches) been able to successfully round trip some DWFs between different offices. However, the oddity is that we get extremely long save times after changing status or adding notes to the DWF markups in Revit and saving either locally or during a STC. Basically whenever Revit attempts to save the DWF back to the file we will hang for 10-30 minutes. That is a crazy amount of downtime just for a save.
Has anyone experienced this issue?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Are you doing this across your WAN?
In order for Revit to save changes it needs to access the original file so your connection speed or bandwidth may be the issue

[Brockway]

Well, all files (revit central and DWF's) are all located in our LAN. We noteced that if we make no modifications to the DWF markups in Revit then the file saves and/or saves to central in just a couple minutes (no 10-30 min stall before beginning to save). It's all about the DWF, obviously. When we open the DWF in Review and modify and save there is no where near the long save times.