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 · Accepted solution]

There is no list that I know of.

But export a mapping table in 28 and you will have a list of every parameter and default value for every object in your loaded library.

2 things you don't want to do in my opinion.

1. Don't edit the GDL scripts to use the parameter values (attributes) of your choice.

You will need to do this every time there is a library update (or new Archicad version).

2. Do not change an attribute to something else (keeping the same index number)

i.e. do not change '15 Wood - Pine Grained Horizontal' to '15 My Timber Surface'.

This will affect every single object and element that is using surface attribute 15.

Keep attribute 15 as it is and create a new one for My Timber Surface.

Create favourites that use My Timber Surface instead of Wood Pine.

So yes, append your attributes to the default template so they all have different attribute number.

And set up favourites to use your attributes.

Try to keep all of the default attributes, so that if you copy and paste anything from any other file or load a 3rd party library (based on the default template attributes), there will be nothing missing or mixed up.

The Mapping Tool is exactly what we need now - for library objects.

In the list it creates, you can edit every 'surface fill = 15' entry to 'surface fill = 665' for all objects or just the ones you want.

The problem is it is a very manual process at this stage.

Super easy to make a mistake.

This only helps with objects though.

For other elements (walls, slabs, etc.) you will still have to amend the composites to use the building materials you want an adjust the building materials to use the surface and fill attributes you want.

I have done this mapping and now have the default Graphisoft library using my attributes in my template, which are completely different.

Previously I have not been able to use the default Graphisoft library easily.

Now I can use it without having to change any values in the objects I place.

Barry.

[Keymaster]

Thank you for the help. 

I've basically been doing what you said the last couple days. I finished up all the attributes this morning. I'm fairly certain I broke less than a dozen things. It was a lot of moving things around and then checking and fixing things that came along. Surfaces got fixed but then I had to check the fills with them. Fixed building materials then had to go down the line and check surfaces then fills again. It wasn't bad as you can organize the column to group all the missing things together. 

I think I broke a few things because I did a delete and replace on a few things. I realized after that I should have did something else. I had made a lot of changes and didn't hit OK yet. I figured it was easier to catch a dozen errors in the first couple projects we do, rather than redo all the things I did that weren't saved yet because I didn't finalize the pop-up.