June 12, 2009

Copying a Schedule Table Between Drawings

Fun Schedule Feature Fact of the Day:

If you copy a Schedule Table from one drawing to another via the clipboard, all of the objects that are part of the Schedule Table's selection set also get copied from the source drawing to the target drawing. If those objects happened to be anchored objects (like Doors), then the anchored objects as well as the parent objects also get copied. Schedule Tags, if present, do not get copied. (There is a Tag Anchor that ties the Schedule Tag to the tagged object, but the "come along for the ride" effect is not two-way - clipboard copying the parent object does not bring the child object along, but clipboard copying the child object does bring the parent.)

I was aware that the parent object comes along when clipboard copying Doors, Windows and the like between drawings, but apparently never thought about Schedule Tables, until today. I had a file with several "working"* Schedule Tables in a base drawing file ("Construct" for those of you using Project Navigator - I am not), and someone else needed the file so that it could be processed and bound to a "sheet" file for use by others outside of my firm. I did not want to lose the Schedule Tables (there were some fussy selection sets involved), but knew that they did not belong in the bound file. I made a local copy of the file under a different name and then deleted the Schedule Tables from the original file before handing the files off to the colleague who was preparing the bound drawings. When I got the base drawing back, I tried copying the Schedule Tables from the copied drawing, and was successful, until I realized I now had two of every scheduled item in the drawing. A quick UNDO got rid of the duplicates (and the Schedule Tables). Fortunately, I had straightened out the layering previously and had a good layer filter string for the Schedule Tables, so I was able to quickly remake them in the base files and get the desired objects selected with a window on the first try.

* - By "working" Schedule Tables, I mean Schedule Tables I placed for my personal use in checking and coordinating the scheduled items in the base drawing file. These Schedule Tables will not ever be part of the official documentation, are there to make it easier to find specific items in specific rooms and will eventually be deleted when the task at hand is complete.

No comments: