Troubleshooting

Today I was opening the Arch model (local) and got a ton of warnings regarding dimension strings that needed to be deleted due to their references being invalid. The dialog below was followed by two more dialogs and hundreds of deleted elements.

Unfortunately Revit doesn’t really do a good job at letting us investigate what the heck is going. A way to open a view and see the dimensions about to be deleted would be a good start.

At this point the only thing you can do is to click the Expand button and save the report to html so you can view it later. Unfortunately my project was issued for bid last week and we’re now working on some revisions, so losing all these dimensions is a big problem. The only thing that came to mind was a problem with the structural linked file. So once the project opened, I looked through the html file, picked an enlarged plan detail and opened it up. As feared, the grids and columns were missing, which took away the dimensions.

Now the silver lining is that I was the only one working at this time, so I quickly closed out and checked what was going on with the structural file. Someone inadvertently wrote over the central file while in the process of doing a save-as with this project to start a new one(don’t get me started on that!). So no wonder that dimensions all of a sudden had invalid references!

Lessons learned

1. Keep a weekly pdf/dwf set so you can easily compare what was lost when things go haywire. Or kill trees and print on paper.
2. When bad things happen, make sure everyone gets out of the project while troubleshooting. This prevents major loss of work. For example in this case if someone saved to central after deleting all dims, we would be in some serious trouble. Hopefully now all we need to do is restore the Structural model and re-open the Architectural local.
3. Training, training, training (if you’re in management, this is the most important of all).

For Autodesk

1. Give us a way to investigate and see what is about to happen to the model!!
2. Give us a way to unload links while opening. This way we can keep working and not lose any dimensional references when links are messed up. Currently I’m on hold while we fix the problematic link and then re-open the local. My only option at this point is to close everyone out of the Structural model, rename the folder and then launch my local, thus preventing it from finding the link and only temporarily remove dimension references, rather than permanently.

EDIT: As reader “S” suggested in an email to me, you can unload the workset on which a Revit link resides (which is why it’s recommended that each Revit link is placed on a unique workset). This acts similar to unloading the link while opening the file. However if the problem file was a dwg for example and this was linked in a drafting view, there would be no way to unload it except by renaming the file or folder in which it resides using Windows Explorer.

Troubleshooting