Topic Title

Will v12 be offering relative pathing of Xrefs as a feature?

I think I kind of know what your asking, but can you elaborate some?

In v11, let's say you copy a file(s) (with Xrefs) to another subfolder to use
on another job, or you bring it home to work on and your network uses
a different drive letter than your C:\ drive at home, opening the file will
result in catastrophic orphan warnings. Every single Xref path, even
though in the same exact location RELATIVE to the master file, needs to
be manually updated before any work can be done. In our case, this
means hundreds of Xrefs in dozens of directory folders for each project.

The solution to this is a "relative pathing" feature which has been at the
top of the wishlist ever since Xrefs were introduced. This feature would
automatically adjust Xref paths in every file in a project based on the
(in most cases) minor variation in path name. So, if your project is on the
J:\ drive at work and on your C:\ drive at home, DataCAD would
recognize this (even via simple user input like J to C) and update all Xref
paths by simply substituting C for J. You would then be able to work on
your project in a matter of seconds or minutes instead of hours.

Does this make sense?

Got ya. What I do is create a folder at on my home system, enable sharing on that folder (by right clicking on it, sharing...), then in My Computer, go up to Tools, Map Network Drives. In your case, select J for your drive letter. Then for the folder, click browse. Browse your computers Network Places (even if your not really on a network at home) and you should see your computer, and the shared folder, select it and click o.k. Click o.k. again. You will now have a J drive on your computer.

So at work copy what ever job folder from the root J drive, bring it home and paste it into your new J drive. Also, we have a folder called "Defaults" that stores the xrefs that our files use for our title blocks, and other default stuff, so I copy that and bring it home. I'll update it every so ofter when I know that the default files have changed.

Hope this helps ya. Works great for me and no xref issues at all with this.

That a neat little trick there Josh. Nice one

Josh...

That is an ingenius idea

I never thought about mapping a folder as a drive. I have the same problem regularly that Steve mentions and this should help alot.

I know what I am going to be doing when I get home tonight!

The only thing is you have to browse thru Network Places in order to make sure the mapping works. If you try to browse via My Computer it won't work. Glad to help

Hmmm! Shows some promise, but I lost you at "enable sharing." I don't
see anything resembling this when I right click.

Josh, you should post this to the cheap tricks category, as it could help
out a number of people. If this could work for us, I'm sure we would use
it until DataCAD makes relative pathing a feature. It's still needed for
copying a job to another folder.

Great idea.

Go in through windows manager (explorer) and right click on the folder and select properties

One of the tabs should be sharing.

Nope. No tab called "sharing." There's "General", "Security", "Previous
Versions", "DFS", and "Customize." I'm obviously missing something.

Edit - I'm on my computer at work, which may have this disabled by the
powers that be. I'll try it at home this weekend.

Is your desktop actually on the server?

If you go into your file manager (windows explorer/manager/whatever) go into program files or whatnot and right click on one of those files. Then select properties and see what tabs are available.

Gotta make sure you are doing it on your computer and not the network.

Greg,
Oh, that's probably it. My desktop is not on the network here at work. I'll have to wait to get home to try it out, where I don't have a network. Thanks a bunch you guys.

If your not using permission based sharing, Try this...

Open My Computer, Tools, Folder Options, View Tab, At the bottom of the Advanced Settings scroll box, Check Use Simple File Sharing, click o.k. Now right click on your folder you want to use, select properties and select the sharing

Your network admin may have sharing turned off for clients. Depending on your networks complexity, you probably have permission based sharing. To share based using Permissions you'll want to consult your network admin so you don't get in trouble for something. They can be real whiny "If you share a folder you'll get the dooms day virus and the universe will implode!" Usually something to that extent.

This article discusses both simple sharing and advanced sharing (network permission based) to get you sharing.

Josh,

I just got done setting up this share idea. It worked perfectly. I was able to copy some files from the servr at work and load them here and did not get any orphan messages like I normally would.

Definitely a Best Of Cheap Tricks winner if there ever was one! !

So is the answer to my original question, "no"?