Errors with an item in an exchange drawing

[HybridAWD]

Just pray you do not come across an issue when you are defining tag numbers in an exchange drawing. Yet another glitch I have found.

I have been working on these exchange drawings for a few days now and it seems that it will never end. Well today, to my surprise, there is another issue with the software.

I have some sort of problem with a control valve, whether it's the tag, the valve itself or whatnot. Either way there is an error.

So what the program does is simply stops working. It's almost like you get switched to regular AutoCAD. The CATT command does not work nor does anything else, however, it will allow you to save (which I recommend).

Once you get back into that drawing, you have to go through each valve, equipment, instrument and whatever else was left out and manually change the tag number. I have not verified whether or not it duplicates the tag numbers if left alone. I would imagine it would.

[Data Wrangler]

Be careful with that drawing. If the exchange is interrupted halfway thru the process, the objects that were not processed will have the same link ID as the original document, leading to drawings that are cross-linked.

That means if you change the tags on the copy, the original drawing will also change.

Not good.

Derek

[HybridAWD]

yeah i just found that out -_- this really sucks. I assume there is no way around this either... which could be a problem

[Data Wrangler]

Try this- use the db command in the original drawing to randomly drag the instrument bubbles around. Any that leave the circles behind, just dragging the text - use the 'clean up bubble' command (new bubble should appear) on the text and erase the broken leftover circles. You can then put the bubble back. This seems to 'repair' the instrument, and has gotten me past the dreaded “lentityp nil” error before.

Derek

[Data Wrangler]

Does anyone have more information on that particular error?

"Lentityp nil"

Derek

[HybridAWD]

Check this out:

I deleted the drawings, purged... did the whole 9 yards. I bring the exchanged drawing back in, run through the manual tagging steps. I never get prompted to changed the instrument tags. However... it does give them a separate Link ID. Kind of weird if you ask me.

[dave]

Try this- use the db command in the original drawing to randomly drag the instrument bubbles around. Any that leave the circles behind, just dragging the text - use the 'clean up bubble' command (new bubble should appear) on the text and erase the broken leftover circles. You can then put the bubble back. This seems to 'repair' the instrument, and has gotten me past the dreaded “lentityp nil” error before.

Derek

here is what I found on a quick google search..

http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?threadID=119617
http://groups.archivesat.com/AutoCAD_2004/thread193816.htm

Both related to express tools.

[dave]

Hybrid, a while ago PeterJ posted this. I have found it a usefull tool


some object must cause the error when being regenerated.
Open a functioning drawing and set the 'link and regen options' (p&id menu / preferences) to 'manual' and 'off'.
( Or set UPDATE_MODE=0 in the [AT_ASI] of AT.INI)
This will allow you to open drawings without updating.
Also add the 2 like in following example to the asiregen command in pid-sup.lsp (after the line I asked you to add earlier)

(prins (strcat prmpt " " (itoa (sslength ss)) " " (ASSVAL ENT 5) " " ))
(setq uip (assval ent 10))
(command "_.zoom" "c" uip 50) ; modif the 50 to smaller value if you work in imperial size ...

if you open the drawing (it should be possible now ..), run the ASIREGENALL command ('regen all data' from the menu). It now zooms in on each item that is being refreshed, that might help identifying the object that causes the error.

running this lisp will zoom on the object breaking your regen...

[Data Wrangler]

From the Autodesk web site:



"lentityp nil"

It means that some LISP function is expecting an entity name as its
argument, and instead of an entity name it's getting "nil".

[HybridAWD]

Ok so here is what I have come across.

As said above, when you come across this error it keeps all of the same link id's as the drawing it was exchanged from. Obviously this is a BAD BAD situation. So, there is no real good way to get around this is you come across this error other than just deleting everything that is left.

So now that those cards on the table, what about deleting the drawing from the doc mananger and purging all tags. Well, that would be fine if your exchanged drawing didnt hold links to the existing. So when you delete and purge all the tags, guess what goes with it... the original tags as well. This is a complete mess yet.

So now you deleted the drawing and purged all of the tags. When you open up the original, obviously you will have the red wagon wheel errors. All you have to do is saved and repair the links. It will recover 99% if not all of them. However... something freaks out with the lines causing them to forget whether they are a major or minor line, so it loses everything. It's no longer a run either.

So my advice? Hopefully there is a backup somewhere and you can just restore that. Since my project was so big, I had to create a lot of exchange drawings. So I will just grab from one of those in another folder and go through the steps again to link everything.

[HybridAWD]

The possible work around:

In the drawing you have exchanged, type SLP to find all nodes. Group erase everything on that drawing. Then delete the exchanged drawing and purge all tags.
Open the original drawing, you will get errors, just save and fix DB. Then regen external data and they will disappear. Now you need to go through and find the mistake. Mine was a few instruments, so I use clean bubble and for some reason it fixes it.

**Note** when deleting items from the exchanged drawing, if you have an issue deleting it, that is the item that has the problem.

[Data Wrangler]

When I was doing my exchanging this weekend I ran across the same error occasionally. If I did, then I immediately quit out of the new drawing without saving and deleted the new drawing out of doc manager so I could try again. If you do this, the original drawing in the project will not be affected by cross linking and you can go into it and try looking for the bad data.