Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Danger of Shared Coordinates

So many people have seen or gotten this error before:

"Linked file File FILE NAME.rvt cannot be saved because it has changes in more than just shared coordinates and therefore can invalidate Local Files owned by you."


What this error hints at is that Shared Coordinates are invasive and indicate that even when you think you've done nothing, something has occurred between linked file because they have Shared Coordinates. What we've seen recently with our project that is in Revit Server is that shared coordinates are very invasive! We've seen a number of "false" locks on Central Files from users who are not actively working on the Central File that is locked. Instead the presence of Shared Coordinates between linked files causes a lock on one of the linked the Central File by a user working in the host file.

To be clear, none of these false locks have caused lost work, or prevent team members from getting their work done. There have been a few delays, but mainly it has left us scratching our heads, attempting to determine:

  1. Who has the file locked.
  2. How the lock got there in the first place.
Without Workshare Monitor to tell you what is going on in the Central File (and more importantly who is "working" on the file) its a bit more of a challenge to track down the issue. Bluestreak's Activity Monitor does not really help either, because it only reports what has happened, not what is happening.

2 comments:

J said...

Hmmm... Could the issue be coming from linked CAD files and not Revit files? As you may recall, if a linked CAD file is in a project that has Shared Coordinates then Revit can throw this error due to xref & Acad issues... I do recall Steve Stafford telling me that if one gets this warning (and we all have, right?) one needs simply to do the following:

1) Xref each needed, live CAD file into a blank CAD file (0,0,0 and all)...

2) Link THAT into Revit and it should alleviate this erroneous warning (If that is what was throwing the warning, that is)

Cheers!!!
-J

Jason Bailly said...

The one thing that we have come across with Revit Server projects using Shared Coordinates is this.
Someone working in Model A can become the borrower of the Project Information workset in Model B without ever having opened Model B. This has happened when the shared coordinates were defined in Model B and published to Model A. Not sure what triggers it but it has been rare. User can open Model B and SWC to fix. Before doing that, I suggested the user to next time do a complete SWC in Model A to ensure that they are relinquishing all borrowed elements and worksets. I have not heard of the problem since so who knows.