Layout Dropout

[Geoff Francis]

Hi all

I'm posting this (from Chief-Users) as a soul-cleansing public confession, in the hope that it will accomplish it's purpose and may be of assistance to others:

Good News - Problem solved! To recap on my posting of last week...."When I send plans and elevations to Layout and close down at the end of a session, I go back to the Layout file and find that the previously sent
plans, elevations, etc, are no longer there.They are still in the same folder and can be re-sent to layout, but it is all time (all editing needs to be redone). At first I thought it was something to do with plans brought in from CA 6.0, but it happened today on a CA 7.0 fresh start."

Thanks to my PC technician, the cause of the problem has been found. Guess what - it's not the hardware....it's not Chief Architect..... it's Geoff! It was overuse of "dots" (aka full stops or periods). He believes that CA 7.0 could be using a file naming convention similar to the old DOS naming convention of 8.3 (8 characters, a period and then a 3 character extension) - we may stand corrected on the that. By including more than 1 period in the file name, CA 7.0 "thought" that the 3 characters following the first period was the file extension and of course, they didn't match the required extension of .pl, .ca etc. Any other characters following were simply ignored. So, by renaming the file and eliminating the period (allowing Chief Architect to add the appropriate extension), the files were recognised again.

In renaming the files to eliminate the confusion, be careful of another potential trap. If you rename them by selecting FILE, then OPEN, then right clicking and selecting RENAME, you are only changing the.pl (Plan) file, not the associated .ca (Cad) file. The quickest way is to select FILE, then OPEN, then select the .pl file you want to change. With the .pl file open, do a SAVE AS and eliminate excess dots (you can substitute dashes or underscores if necessary, but not dots or slashes) - that way Chief Architect automatically creates the associated Cad and Backup files. If you choose to do the renaming in Windows Explorer, you must also find all the associated files and change them to exactly the same as the .pl file.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help. The problem was me ... I can accept that but it's funny how my idiotic file naming conventions worked perfectly in CA 6.0, but were rejected by CA 7.0. Oh well, live another day...learn another lesson.

Regards
Geoff Francis
Perth Western Australia



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