Wasn’t this already on the roadmap last year? Not being able to edit any hotlink in-place and within context is, in my opinion, a huge limitation. The same issue applies to editing GDL objects, by the way.
It’s so unprofessional that Archicad officially developed the so-called “Iceberg” method. A serious software company should solve problems with proper code, not by introducing messy workarounds.
They even dedicated an entire user manual to it.
Editing modules in a separate .mod file is highly inconvenient: it takes at least a minute to open, provides no context of the main model, and carries the risk of ending up with unsynchronized attributes.
Saving a module as a library part is fast, but you'll lose all BIM-data.
To my knowledge, Archicad is the only professional CAD application without a straightforward system for this workflow. For comparison:
Vectorworks: Symbols
Rhino / AutoCAD: Blocks
Revit: Groups
SketchUp: Components
Blender: Linked Instances
I’m not sure how others feel about this, but solving this would have been far more useful than the new AI features Archicad recently introduced.
@Casper wrote: Editing modules in a separate .mod file is highly inconvenient: it takes at least a minute to open, provides no context of the main model, and carries the risk of ending up with unsynchronized attributes.
I am not a hotlink expert.
But can't you use the iceberg method.
Create a publisher set to same the .MOD file - ideally into the project folder.
Now when you need to make changes, go to the iceberg storey, amend the model and re-publish it.
No need to open the .MOD file, just re-save it.
Pretty close to in-place editing of the hotlink as well, just not quite.
We’ve applied this method in some of our projects as well, and while it does work better than opening separate .MOD files, I still find it a very inconvenient approach for handling repetitive sections of a model. A few remarks:
In my opinion it involves too many steps, which also means more time.
Creating “iceberg” stories makes the model chaotic and bloated. For example, when a module becomes obsolete, the stories usually remain. We’ve had projects with more than 40 iceberg stories, and after a while you completely lose the overview.
Having floating building elements in 3D looks messy. (Yes, you can hide them, but that’s another extra step.)
When generating quantity schedules, it requires additional rules to exclude all objects below a certain level. It’s easy to make mistakes with this, especially for less experienced Archicad users.
It demands a lot of discipline in naming modules clearly—too much for the average user, I would say.
It is not intuitive. New colleagues often struggle to understand the principles behind the method. It’s abstract, and many users are afraid to break things, so they fall back to manually copy-pasting groups.
What I’m really looking for is a kind of ‘locked’ group: something you can copy to other places in the model, and when you double-click it (in 2D or 3D) you enter the group, make your changes, and after exiting, the modifications are applied to every “linked” instance. Also that you can do this on any linked group everywhere in the model, not just the first one you made.
But to go further, .mod must be transformed in "blocks"/"Components"/... Not necessary with the "x-ref" mode of the "moduls".
The problem will always be the interaction with elements outside the block. How do you manage the intersection of a wall located inside a block with a wall located outside? I suppose that's the battle being fought by the creators of Archicad. In SketchUp/AutoCAD, it's been solved; there's no interaction. Is that what we want?
Open