No Moment or Cantilver Moment Symbols

[Tom Weir]

Hi all,
Is anyone else having problems with their beam solid or open moment connection symbols? I am using Build 20050527_2300. The parameter for the moment connections appears in the dialog box, but there is only "none" in the pull-down box.......

Tom Weir
Los Angeles

[Paul Andersen]

Tom, I am currently using the same build as you and mine works as expected when starting with the Structural Analysis-Default or Structural-Default templates. I tried a few things to obtain your scenario and I came up with the following. If you start a project with Construction-Default or from scratch without selecting a template, Connection-Moment-Filled and Connection-Moment-Not Filled families are not loaded and are therefore not available in the project. To check for this I'd see if they appear in your project browser under Families -> Annotation Symbols. (Note: even if you are starting with either of the two Structural Templates I would still verify that these families are loaded . . . we had some content not load completely when we did our network install) If this is the issue with your project I didn't have time to find a quick fix. Simply loading the Moment Families allowed them to be selected in the Moment Symbols area of the Structural Settings dialog but did not solve the problem with Beam properties even if I removed and reloaded the Beam Family. If this is not the problem I would be willing to try your file on my system or follow your procedure with my install to try to duplicate the problem.

[Tom Weir]

Paul,
That's it......I used an old template file. I had one all configured for our company from version 7 and used that. Not such a good idea!

That begs the question though of how to update the template file. I do not want to build it from scratch on each upgrade, and yet I want to maintain all the families and groups I have loaded in that pertain to my company symbols and standards.

How can I do that?

Thanks Paul.

Tom Weir
Los Angeles

[Paul Andersen]

A white paper on best practices for updating templates and families would be nice. A utility to do this for us would be even better. I'd be interested to know how you fixed your project. I thought it would be as simple as loading the families into the project but that didn't seem to work for me.