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A question regarding templates

Anonymous
Not applicable
Hello fellas, can someone help me out pls. I am setting up a template and for example i changed few settings on a normal door, and saved the template. Now when i open a new file with that template first time when i click the door it's the same that i saved in template, but if i go in library and click on other doors, and than back to the door that i changed settings it goes back to default settings (the ones from archicad) and it does not have the settings from template!? How do i fix this, is this a bug? than you in advance.
1 REPLY 1
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
So, to understand this situation, you need to know how library parts such as Doors work.
When a library part is created, you provide default values for its various parameters.
When you switch from one Door (or in general, one library part) to another, the element is loaded with those settings you set when creating the library part. We could call this "LIBRARY PART default settings".

What you did in your Template file is you modified the values of those parameters to set the default values for that Tool. We could call this "TOOL default settings".
When you start working based on that Template, of course, these are the values you will use.

However, if you switch to another Door, then switch back to this Door, the values defined during the creation of the Door will be loaded ("LIBRARY PART default settings"), not the default settings saved in the Template ("TOOL default settings").

(When you do not modify the settings of a Door - or any other GDL-based element type - in the template, the "TOOL default settings" will be the same as the "LIBRARY PART default settings". In that case, switching to among Door elements will not cause any issues.)

There is an easy solution to this though: simply save the default setting for each Tool in the Template as a Favorite.
Then, whenever you need, do not switch back to that Door. Instead, just activate the Favorite.

There is another solution to this issue, but it is more complicated. This would involve opening the Door library part for editing and changing the default values for the parameters there. However, since the Archicad default library is shipped as an LCF, you would have to either
1) extract the LCF into a folder, modify the files, then recreate the LCF, or
2) save to library parts under new names into the Embedded Library)

Based on this, creating those Favorites is the better way to go.
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