Upgrade 7-9: best strategy?

[Anonymous]

We are expecting our 9.0 upgrade to arrive any day - very excited. Also, wondering a lot about the best way to start being productive in the new work environment. We never upgraded to 8, so the whole Plotmaker workflow will be new to us, along with many other things (details, new gdl). New tools and their capabilities I expect to be the least of our concerns.

Does anyone have any suggestions for tackling the learning curve? Tutorial? RTFM (I expect this to be my prefered approach) ? Just start using it (could be hairy)?

Always eager to learn from the mistakes of others...

[Anonymous]

RobertNichols wrote:
Also, wondering a lot about the best way to start being productive in the new work environment. .

Link Ellis in the U.S sound like the man to save your firm both money and a lot of time for this procedure.
This way the firm can save many de-tours when starting to work in AC 9, get the required knowledge and specifics that works best for your type of workflow

[Greg Kmethy]

The fundamental change in library management in AC 8 was the introduction of uniqueID's. Up to AC 7.0 objects were referenced by their name, from version 8 it's done through ID's. If you load an AC 7.0 object in 8 or above, it's ID will be {0}-{0}. This is not a problem, since AC can still identify objects by their name. However, if there is an other object with the same name, ArchiCAD might mix them up.

So the rule is simple:
If you have AC 7.0 or earlier libraries loaded, then you should manage libraries the same way you did in 7.0: make sure there are no duplicate object names.
If you have ArchiCAD 8 or 8.1 libraries loaded, you can just go ahead and load ArchiCAD 9 libraries, duplicate names will not matter.
Make sure though not to load texture pictures twice. Also make sure to load the original Add-On library.

The parameter transfer will also work with old objects. The only difference in AC-9 objects is that you have a flag to mark a parameter 'unique'. (That's the 'U' letter in the parameter list). Such parameters will not be transferred. If you want to lock a parameter like that in an AC 7.0 object, you have to re-save it in AC 9 format.


Greg

[Greg Kmethy]

gkmethy wrote:
If you load an AC 7.0 object in 8 or above, it's ID will be {0}-{0}. This is not a problem, since AC can still identify objects by their name. However, if there is an other object with the same name, ArchiCAD might mix them up.

This is not the case anymore in ArchiCAD 9, if you do this:

-Open the ArchiCAD 7.0 file in ArchiCAD 9 with ONLY the ArchiCAD 7.0 library loaded.
- save the file
- Now you can load the ArchiCAD 9 library too
- Make sure that both libraries are loaded every time you open the file.

This way library parts withe the same name will not mix, not even if one of them comes from ArchiCAD 7.0 or earlier. The references of the old objects with GUID {0}-{0} will always point to the ArchiCAD 7.0 library.

[Thomas Holm]

Does this mean you should NOT / need not archive (save as .pla) projects before transferring them if you want to go directly from AC7 to AC9?

[Greg Kmethy]

It is not a must, but a good idea to save projects as PLA when transferring your project into a new version for two reasons:
- you can back up your project at the stage you transferred it with all the necessary library parts.
- you probably will not use any of the ArchiCAD 7.0 objects that you have not used so far, so it is unnecessary to load parts that you have never used, and will never use.

Keeping the loaded library as small as possible reduces loading times, especially when libraries are loaded via network.

Greg