AEC objects nightmare

[erikh695634]

I'm sure I'm not the only one with these issues and I did a search but did not find what I'm looking for. A little background before I ask my question. We are a small Fire Sprinkler design company. Three designers and one boss/designer/reviewer. Two of us are on AutoCAD 2012 and one has AutoCAD 16 and one on AutoCAD 17. We use a piggyback program called SprinkCAD to design our systems.

When the two guys who have 2012 open a drawing from someone using the newer versions (or an outside contractor) we get AEC warnings and the drawings open very slowly. When copying and pasting, operations slow to a crawl and sometimes stop. The drawing size grows exponentially just from copying a small detail from one drawing to another. This has become a problem in that SprinkCAD does not like drawings over 17 mb and doesn't behave well when they are. We have tried AECTOACAD and it does shrink drawings very well and they open much better, until we try to copy and paste or save or switch from one drawing to another. This is killing productivity.

The details we copy and paste have been accumulated from past versions all the way back to release 14 and number in the hundreds.

The popup we get when these things are happening is:

This application has detected a mixed version of AEC objects in this operation. Newer AEC objects will be disallowed from participating in this operation.

What can we do to make this work normal again? It's driving us crazy.

Any help is appreciated,

Thanks,

Erik

[--AuBe--]

I'm not exactly sure what is causing all this trouble. I can think of a few things I would check and try, like proxy object settings, bursting the AEC objects (there is a thread on the LISP forum working on a burst all in dwg command, could be modified) so it is a little hard to solve this problem without being able to duplicate it.

One tip that might be of help though is to purge your REGAPPS. Regapps can build up and take a great deal of space if they are not purged and most people don't really think to do so.
You have to purge from the command line and not from the dialog box with -PURGE and then select R

I have had a .dwg file go from 3MB to 245K by doing this. Might not solve all your problems, but it might help.

[cadtag]

your fundamental issue is mixing versions of AutoCAD -- the good people at Autodesk believe that you spending money frequently to upgrade - regardless of whether the later versions offer anything useful to you - is far more important than interoperability between versions.

If the AECTOCAD option works, the decision you'll have to make is how much overhead money you're willing to spend to go back through your R14 & newer drawing and a) clean them out and up, and b) organize the actual details so they can be INSERTed instead of cut-n-paste.

Alternative, move everyone to Acad 2018 on annual rental basis and stay current, or b) investigate BricsCAD, Ares Commander, or some other workalike that is dwg compatible. I know nothing about SprinkCAD but it's possible that it could work with one of the alternatives.

[dgorsman]

your fundamental issue is mixing versions of AutoCAD -- the good people at Autodesk believe that you spending money frequently to upgrade - regardless of whether the later versions offer anything useful to you - is far more important than interoperability between versions.

Which *completely* ignores the valid technical reasons for those changes. But hey, whatever...

Still, you want to keep everyone working on the same project on the same version. You also want to keep your DWG source material in a "clean" state ie. blocks, XREFs, copy-paste sources, and so on. You want to work on those using plain, non-vertical AutoCAD versions after stripping out any AEC content. Note that doesn't just include custom objects but also data associated with the drawing file stored as objects. A good example of that is using the "-DWGUNITS" command, which while purportedly setting "actual" drawing units creates an AEC data dictionary to do so.

Should also have an eye on annotative scale settings if you aren't already doing so. Things like inherited scale values and layer-per-scale settings can blow things out of proportion.

[erikh695634]

Thanks Everyone. Not sure how we will deal with this but at least we now know what is happening, I'm inclined to believe there is some planned obsolescence involved with this and it might be time for an upgrade. Again thanks to you all.

Erik

[joe.franco420344]

Hello Erik,
I feel your pain, here is a lisp routine that I use ALL the time when opening a drawing. It works flawlessly and reduces drastically the drawing by up to 90%, it's crazy !

;------------------------------------------------------------------
; PURGE DGN LINETYPES
;------------------------------------------------------------------
(defun c:CLEAN()

;----- Clean dgn bloat --------------------------

(if (dictremove (namedobjdict) "acad_dgnlinestylecomp")
(progn
(princ
"\nClean DGN bloat complete. Please check your file for any errors. A purge is recommended."
)
)
(princ
"\nacad_dgnlinestylecomp not found. This file will not benefit from cleandgnbloat."
)
)
(princ)

;------------------------------------------------

(COMMAND "AUDIT" "Y")
(COMMAND "-PURGE" "A" "" "N")

) ;end of clean

I also installed a plug-in from the Autodesk App Store, "Drawing Purge" this app will purge multiple drawings at once and will do the same thing as the lisp routine I sent you.
I'm not sure if the plug-in will work with 2012, but the lisp should work. I have an older version of "DWG Purge" and when purging multiple drawings it looses the thumbview preview.
No big deal, when I go back in the DWG and resave it, I get it back. Maybe the newer version solved the problem.

https://apps.autodesk.com/ACD/en/Detail/Index?id=3773138176974634673&appLang=en&os=Win32_64

Happy Purging !

Joe

[vince.244432]

I wblocked the offending drawing and used the block instead. No more notices!