Layer colorchange XREF to paperspace viewport

[OMEGA-ThundeR]

Hi,

Probably asked a milion times, but how do i transfer the colorchange of a excisting XREF layer through a viewport WITHOUTH messing up my viewport-frozen layers.

9 out of 10 times i set VISRETAIN to 0, reload the XREF and turn visretain back to 1.  The other 1 out of 10 times i just remove the xref and load again. But the effect is the same.  Any frozen state of the layers in a viewport are reset and everything is visible again.

Besides having a color override on a object-properties level, how can i change the color of an XREF layer and also have that change be visible when reloading said xref in the main drawing without any changes to viewport settings.

There must be a very simple answer, but this crap has been my cryptonite since my early days of CAD-ing...

[CyberAngel]

Option 1: if this is due to color overrides in the Xref, there's a system variable XREFOVERRIDE that treats all objects as having color ByLayer. I am just finding this out!

 

Option 2: another system variable, EXTNAME, may restrict object names to 31 characters, letters/numbers, no spaces, and a handful of special characters. If you have spaces in your layer names, they'll be truncated, so some layers could get treated as duplicates and ignored.

 

Option 3: See this AUGI thread. Post #8 explains how VISRETAIN works. Spoiler: it's not as simple as you might think. Solution: change the offending layer name, reload, and change it back.

 

Option 4: if the goal is to freeze a group of layers and they won't stay frozen, could you change their color to the background color? They wouldn't be frozen, but they'd effectively be invisible.

 

Option 5: create a layer state from the viewport and restore it after the Xref reloads. Eh, may not work if I understand the Option 3 link correctly.

[OMEGA-ThundeR]

Visretain seems to be the recurring 'way to go', but this thawing of objects in all the viewports is just a chore to fix on some long running projects with over 50 viewports spread over multiple layouts.  In the meanwhile i discovered the 'VPLAYER' command that lets me freeze a certain layer in all viewports on all the layouts (in this case having it on a not-printed layer would be easier though, but sometimes it's not allways all the viewports, even if 1 layout shouldn't have something frozen this commands is of little help).

Ok, a layerstate (LAS?) could possible fix that, but that also is an extra few steps to restore something that shouldn't even be 'broken' in the process.

Making objects not visible on a white sheet of paper might be á solution, but i fail to see how this would be a practical way of doing things.  You could just put them on a not-printable layer.

Open xref, Changing the layername, change color,  save, reload, open xref, change back to old name, save, reload... Yeah... that makes layerstates seems like the lazy option 
But good to know it as an option.

Lets see if someone else comes up with something :).