Dealing with Missing Attributes

[Keymaster]

@Barry Kelly In this thread 

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Collaboration-with-other/Missing-Object-Surface-Defaults/td-p/33... 

I screenshot the comment I'm speaking about. 

I ran into this problem. We are using 27 solo and I want to go up to 28 solo soonish. I edited a ton of things in our template.  It works fine, but now that I started working on a 28 template I'm learning a lot of default objects have missing things. I didn't notice before because I have favorite starters for almost everything we use daily.

I can't fix 1000s of objects. I'd be better off almost starting fresh and then redoing all the changes to surface names and images. You mention fixing it with the index numbers. Can you get more into detail about this? How do I know what the default index number I'm missing is? There are two columns of numbers in the attibute manager? Which is the index number (one doesn't say anything, the other has a work street sign looking thing as a header)? I think this might be my best course to go from my 27 solo template into the new solo 28 global library. I'm trying to do some research to avoid doing things twice or more. I'm limited in some of my attribute management because we are using Solo version. That's why I manually changed surface names to names with numbers for our office.

Thanks for any help you can provide

Operating system used: Mac Apple Silicon

[Barry Kelly]

There is no migration of objects from 27 to 28.

It is basically start again with a new template based on the default Graphisoft 28 template.

This may help...

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Libraries-objects/Archicad-28-Migration-Converting-from-Monolith...

If you don't want to go through the process of setting up all your personal touches in the new template, you can simply open your old 27 template.

Delete the 27 library and load the 28 library packages.

You may have a few or a lot of 'missing' objects - depending what you have in your template.

You need to track these down and replace them with the alternative 28 version set with the parameters as you want.

There is no easy way to do this.

As for the favourites, there is a favourite converter tool.

I have used it and it seems to work fine.

Links for downloads and documentation can be found in this post ...

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Libraries-objects/Favorite-Converter-Tool-AC28/m-p/634452

Make sure your Model View Options are set, as there are new features in there as well.

As for the attribute, ideally you want your template to use the default attributes as they are in the Graphisoft template, so they work with the library objects.

However, with the new Global Libraries, there is a way to map the attribute used in your template to the library objects so they use the attributes in your template.

At the moment there is no tool to easily do this (supposedly coming soon).

At present, it is a very long winded manual process of editing a mapping table and it is very easy to make a mistake which is super frustrating.

But if you have converted your favourites, you can get away with not doing this.

Barry.

[Keymaster]

I'll have to dive deeper into some of your suggests and see how much stuff is broken. I feel like it's something I'm going to start and mess up. Starting over will probably be better than fixing errors.

I left most building materials and fills the same besides a few extra ones I added for our template. Exampe. We only had gypsum board material. I added a plaster material as we do a lot of old work remodels.

My biggest issue is the default surfaces aren't great. Graphisoft has grey spelled grey and gray mixed up. Every time a dev made an new surface it's like they didn't look at what was already there and made up their own naming convention. Here's a screenshot of basically what I set up. The surfaces are mostly I assume what will be the missing information in the default archicad 28 objects. I also added the extra surface library from graphisoft. That had a ton of duplicates and stupid things in it. We have hundreds of surfaces to make work with default objects. I reorgainzed graphisofts default surfaces of around 500 plus and then added 100 plus new ones. It makes the project super bloated, but I store that library on a NAS. We very rarely use a consultant. I deal with those when they pop up.

[Keymaster]

I've made some progress and it's working well so far as I can tell. 

If I just add all my surfaces with attribute manager and append them to the 28 default template then I go through each default surface and delete and replace with one of my own surfaces will that affect future template version and break default objects. Am I fixing index numbers doing that or is that a per project fix that won't help me.  Basically there are less default surfaces than I have added surfaces. It would be faster that way if it would work long term without doing it every version.

Edit: I just tried the delete and replace and it uses the new index number instead of the one you are deleting. Shame

[Barry Kelly]

Edit & Replace will swap one attribute for another and all elements (including already placed objects) that use that attribute will now be using the new attribute.

However, a new object that you place from the library will have a 'missing' attribute (i.e. surface material), because it is scripted into the objects GDL code.

You will need to edit each object to swap each parameter to the new attribute (not a good idea).

With the 28 Global libraries, there is a new 'Mapping Table' that can be used to map parameters to other values, so you can effectively swap one material for another.

But this is not an easy process at the moment.

There is information here about an easier process about the mapping ... https://graphisoft.com/resources-and-support/downloads/?section=bim-content

The video shows how it is done but I am not clear on what Python script is being run to convert the XML file to a CSV file.

If anyone knows, please let me know.

I would say it is best for you to keep the default Graphisoft attributes and add your own.

There are really only a handful of attributes actually used, so you only need to keep those.

But it is a bit of trial and error to figure out which ones they are - there is no list.

Barry.