Dimension Strings Disappearing at the Eleventh Hour

[Anonymous]

Here is a post I submitted to tech support last night that might be interesting to know. Has anyone else had the same occurrence?

"Today my partners and I were all working on final coordination before we issued the job for bidding. This 1.5 Million dollar addition has now been put on hold for a few more days because about 70% of the dimension strings decided to disappear. File in question is a teamwork file (33MB) that four people have been working in for the past two months. This problem (and I do call it a major problem) has happened twice before in this file, but not to the extent that occurred today."

"Areas of the model that dimension strings have disappeared were two floor plans, all of the building sections and all of the interior elevations that are still linked. We have not deleted anything that even remotely was connected to any of the dimension strings that disappeared."

"An interesting thing has also occurred. I managed to find one or two dimension strings that appeared to still be present in two different building sections still linked. However, only their text was present and not their string or tick marks."

"What is the solution for fixing such an overwhelming problem this late in our projects evolution?"

If any

[__archiben]

matt

what a coincidence! a very similar thing happened in our office just today, although not to the extent that you have experienced.

a user in our office was actually deleting some dimensioned elements that were being omitted from the project. the dimension line and 'ticks', as you call them, all disappeared along with the elements, however some of the text - not all of it - stayed on screen. it could not be deleted!

i told the guy to send and receive, but i must admit that i didn't go back to check to see if it had been resloved. i just put it down to another teamwork quirk. i think that i may have to keep my eye on this . . .

~/archiben

[Anonymous]

If you have a backup copy of the file with the dimensions still intact you could select the dimensions, make them static and save as a module for each affected drawing, then merge them into the latest file. It's not pretty and it's not dynamic any more but it could get the drawings out quickly if there is not to much tweaking and checking to be done to the old dimensions.

[Anonymous]

Ben and Matthew,

Glad to know I'm not the only one that's run into this problem. Fortunately/Unfortunately, it only took two people 4-5 hours to replace the lost dimension strings.