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"Open Drawing, Previous Versions AEC Objects Detected" popup- What to do???


CADchallenged

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Hi, brand new here and will ask a lot of dumb questions!!! I am a Hospitality interior designer and sometimes I get DWG plans from architects and upon first opening I get this pop up that tells me "the drawing was last saved in an earlier version of the software" and then tells me "saving the drawing will update any AEC objects in it to the current version, which will be incompatible with earlier versions." Okay....what the heck does that really mean? I have to open it and "save as" which will result in incompatibility; right? I usually ignore this pop up as I didn't understand it and wanted it to just go away. I have found on past projects with many DWG file sharings, I was not able to use some commands like fillet and stretch which I use a lot. I was also not able to copy and paste objects from one DWG file to another. I got "select insertion point" instead of them appearing like before. Not sure if this is all affected by the AEC objects or if that is another issue altogether....

Anyway, I would like more explanation in LAYMAN'S terms please on what I should do and how it affects my drawings and back and forth sharing with client's and architects. I am not a "strong" CAD designer and have found I have made a lot of bad habits over the past 8 years. Now that I am on my own, I want to correct these habits and really understand what I am doing.

Using AutoCAD Architecture 2012. Looking forward to your responses; thank you!

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When you go to do a save as, you can select saving to a prior version(s) level in the Save As..dialog, Files of Type dropdown list. Caution, two dwg files with the same name will overwrite each other even though they are different release versions.

 

Or, on your Options dialog, Open And Save tab, you can select a version to default all of your saved dwg files to without having to do a save as. You can change this default each time you work on a different dwg version level.

 

AEC objects are nothing more than things like materials, blocks, tables, text styles, dimension styles, hatches etc.

 

Different release versions sometimes have different ways of handling AEC objects, sometimes there is added functionality in each newer version of AutoCad. For instance, dynamic blocks did not exist prior to 2007 or 2009 version, forgot which, so if you build one in your 2012 version and save as back to 2006 or earlier, the block will not function dynamically in the earlier version. You can save back far enough to turn multi-line text into a stack of individual single line text objects. Re-opening a saved as, retrograded drawing file in a newer version doesn't always restore the newer functionality to the AEC objects either. It will not automagicly change the text degraded to single-line text back to multi-line text. It will remain a stack of single line text. Since dynamic block data is saved in the individual dwg file, the dynamic functionality will not return either.

 

The incompatible part of the message just means that you will have to save as, to that earlier version for the file to be compatible and operable by that version.

 

Not being able to use fillet and stretch probably has more to do with whether the lines are polylines or lines or a mixed bag of both, than any version issues. For instance, a rectangle or a box drawn with a closed polyline will stretch. A box constructed of line segments will not. Lines will fillet, but only to other lines, and they have to be close enough together. You can fillet a polyline to a line, but the line has to be converted to a polyline first (I think), I rarely use a simple line for anything, they're just not as easily modified in groups or continuous strings as a polyline.

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  • 3 months later...

This isn't a problem unless you get mixed versions of AEC objects in the same drawing. I have fought that off and on for years. If the origin of the AEC objects is Architectural Desktop, Inventor, Revit, etc. and you are running plain vanilla AutoCAD, then they will not go away simply by saving to a previous version. These are dictionary entries in the database that AutoCAD considers to be unpurgeable. Even the -EXPORTTOAUTOCAD and AECTOACAD commands (Which are allegedly there to get rid of these objects) won't touch them.

 

There is a third party utility called Superpurge (Available for free) that will remove them, but it needs to be used with extreme caution, as it can render the drawing unopenable.

Edited by ocotillo
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