Civil 3D Drawing Through a Network...

...is like eating stew with a straw. You can do it, but it will take a long time and make your face hurt eventually.

The following is from Russ, my esteemed colleage. Eventually, I gotta figure out how to make him a collaborator on my blog.

Lou,

In the last couple of days, or weeks, I have run into several customers that are working on their drawings over a network. I mean, the file is out on the network but they don’t save it to a local drive location before working on it. I did not realize myself that this was “bad” behavior in regular ACAD. As it turns out, its VERY BAD in Civil 3D.

Objects that are accessed during the course of drawing can become unstable/corrupt as that network stored info is accessed. I have seen this in corridors in particular, but I believe recently an alignment and a surface (two different customers) fell victim to this. In all the cases the corruption was such that the object had to be completely recreated, not just “fixing” the original, and even this worked only after the file was moved to a local drive location! It’s a serious issue. Also, it may not always effect drawings. Just enough that once in a while a drawing goes really bad!

Maybe you can put that out on your blog. I don’t get enough of these ideas to maintain a blog all my own (at least not yet), but yours is doing well. Its just one of those issues that we need to disseminate as widely as possible. In every case the users have said, “really?!" So they really have never heard this. I hadn’t until I had been here at MG about 6 months!

Thanks,

Russ