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Changing the Revision Date in AC 18

Anonymous
Not applicable
I must be missing something using the Revision Manager in AC 18...

When an issue is currently open, the issue date is automatically set to "work in progress". We cannot set the date manually.

When an issue is closed, the issue date is automatically set to the date the "close issue" button was clicked. We cannot set the date manually.

Anyone know how to manually set the date?


thanks
15 REPLIES 15
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
I think it is not possible to manually set a date.
You can probably change your system date, close the issue, then set the system date back to normal.
I don't know, you might have to restart ArchiCAD for it to read the new system date, but maybe not, I haven't tried it.
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
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Anonymous
Not applicable
If true, then that is an enormous design flaw.

For example: if the team is working toward issuing a set next wednesday they wouldn't actually be able to close the issue and publish EXCEPT ON THAT EXACT DAY?!

Huge fail. Someone please tell me this isn't true.
Eduardo Rolon
Moderator
The "accepted" trick is to create a Custom Field for the Date and use the "hardwired" one as a baseline.
Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB ram, OS X 10.XX latest
another Moderator

Anonymous
Not applicable
Thanks. I'll give that a try.
Marton Kiss
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
Thanks Eric for bringing this up. I forwarded this to our design team for consideration.

Marton
Marton Kiss
VP, Product Success
GRAPHISOFT
__archiben
Booster
Eric wrote:
If true, then that is an enormous design flaw.

For example: if the team is working toward issuing a set next wednesday they wouldn't actually be able to close the issue and publish EXCEPT ON THAT EXACT DAY?!

Huge fail. Someone please tell me this isn't true.
I hear you - massive fail. I battled for hours last night trying to bend revision manager to my requirements. Utter failure and a wasted five hours.

I need to a bring a big project through from 17 which has manual revisions already noted on the layouts: I thought it would be easy to create the historic revisions to be able to take advantage of the revisioning system going forward. Scratch that idea.

I would also like for my revisions to be to letters. Too much to ask? It appears so: How can I make my Revision ID a letter that clocks up for each layout automatically????? A custom field in the scheme (WTF is that all about anyway?) like the date work-around above does not work in this case because each layout needs to clock up one letter on an individual basis....
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__archiben
Booster
And don't get me started about about autotext in the publisher...

Firstly, who thought it was a good idea to exclude the project number, (or even the project name if you like long file names!) from the list of available autotext options? Project names/numbers are as critical to document management in a file system as dates, revisions and status in any industry not just architecture.

And then there is the age-old 80% complete publisher feature that makes a nonsense of the whole automation process: If you add a new layout (or any publishing item), to a publishing set after you have set up custom naming rules / print options / export file types it still just comes through as a plain-old vanilla, built-in automatic conventions.

This is a HUGE issue right the way through the project navigator which makes a mockery of trying to automate anything in ArchiCAD: cloned viewpoints with custom view settings are ignored if a new Viewpoint is created when different settings are active; cloned layouts or even the entire cloned layout book in publisher sets default to standard print settings, file types, etc if a new layout is created after the publishing set its created and customised... want to print a reduced A3 set of your documents? Great except that all of the layouts created after the publisher set is customised to 'Fit to page' in the printer still print as 8 tiled sheets... want to quickly publish a DWG batch to send to a collaborator? Of course you can, except for all those PDF files you created by accident because any newly item item to a "Save files" publisher set automatically default to PDF... Want the custom naming conventions of published>saved files in AC18 to be applied to any new layout added to that publisher set? Of course you do, except that it doesn't.

Want to know what's worse than manually managing the publishing and file saving requirements of a complex and large system? Managing a half-automatic/half-manual complex system, that's what. I've lost count of the amount of times I've recreated entire view subsets, and complete publisher sets because I've lost track of what's working automatically and what's new and requires manually adjusting. I've lost count of the times I've printed a reduced A3 set and had a batch of tiled A1 drawings (8xA3 sheets with mostly blank and cropped information) appear half way through somewhere.

Here is the really easy principle to fix the publisher and actually bring true automation to ArchiCAD's file management - which is especially critical with the launch of Revision Management. Ready? A child item inherits the rules of its enclosing parent unless it itself has been manually modified.

How difficult can it be?
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Gergely Hari
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
About Issue Date:
this is precisely why we included the custom fields in the Issue / Change, so you can add any data to them, and list that data both in the Revision History / in the project indexes / autotexts.

All dates behave the same way as any created/modified date in any file system: they are maintained automatically, based on when things actually happen to it; but if you need other dates for identification purposes, you can add them as metadata to the file / just include them in the filename.

Same here, if you're content with the system date, because you work on projects small enough that you actually close the issue on the day you wish to appear on the Layout, then use the system date. If you need to identify a different date, add that date manually to the Issue.

About publisher renaming:
- I agree the list could be more extensive, but right now the set is limited to those fields that can actually be different Layout-by-Layout. When batch-renaming all Layouts in a publisher set, it isn't that hard to include the project ID manually in the scheme; you only have to do it once - not nearly as problematic as renaming the Layouts one-by-one. So data that is common to all layouts was not included in the possible autotext list, only data that is different per layout.

- New items not inheriting the naming scheme: This might be a bug; it is expected to behave the same way as with file types: If all are the same in one folder, the new one inherits that, if they are different, it inherits a default. I will check and log it.

About Revision IDs: see my other reply here.
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
This clip may be helpful about the Publisher Set renaming as it shows that you can type normal text as part of the code for those custom names:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bKxs-PIpH4
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27