Paul Nida wrote:I'm sorry Josh, this just sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Are you saying that reload all doesn't work?
If this can be done on per symbol basis it might be acceptable.
Reload all is even more dangerous than what I am proposing because Reload All leaves you wide open to reloading symbols that you may not want to reloaded based solely on the determining factor of the layer a symbol may reside on. What I propose will only reload symbols which you specifically pick to have this active reload state. You decide what specific, individual symbols have this feature. Nothing disastrous about it. That is unless someone goes and creates a symbol with that option turned on when they don't really want it turned on, but you could say that about tons of commands in Datacad. When used incorrectly, they could cause problems, sure. If it's too scary to have it as an option to set at creation time, it could be done, via a Ctrl+Right click, Symbol Tools, Reload Always or something similar, but I think thats a bit limiting as it's one more thing you will have to remember to toggle it on at insertion time and most likely you will know at the symbols creation time if this symbol would fall under the category of needing to be reloaded.
I fully realize our need for this is probably out of the norm, because of our extensive use of symbols storing all of our details, but I really do see how it can be used for other uses too once implemented. Say you have a groups of symbols which uses symbol attributes to load in a municipal jurisdiction information into them using lookup fields. The symbol is created, and inserted into multiple drawings (20+). These projects are all being worked on at different points of the working drawing process, by multiple people who are in and out of the office all through out the day. Later several of the symbols are updated with some additional fields and information which should be added to all of the previous versions of that symbol. The person who updated the symbols now has to tell every one exactly what symbol has been updated, then each person who works on one of the 20+ files has to remember to go reload each instance of that symbol. Now say that this happens for several details every day, in many more drawings. It just becomes a hassle of having to rely on everyone taking time away from the real project work to handle organizing and managing symbols which they may or may not be aware have changed, that the computer could be doing on the fly. We know it works because like I've said we've been getting the same results by updating the symbols in the one drawing and then using the auto reload feature of the xref with no complaints or issues in our working processes, other than those brought up and we hope can be resolved by adding a feature like this one. If it makes you feel better, you could think of them as xrefs, but just being managed via the symbol browser and stored in dsf files instead of aec files. Which allows for being to use all the symbol browser features like symbol scaling and keeps our reference manager a lot cleaner.