Thursday, June 17, 2010

Undocumented AEC style commands Civil 3D 2011

Everyone is discussing the new undocumented style commands in 2011. They are AECCIMPORTSTYLES and AECCIMPORTSTYLESANDSETTINGS. I have finally sat down to test both of these. I had very high hopes and anticipated these commands would allow users to open any drawing or template and select a group of styles or settings to pull into a master dwg or template. Unfortunately it is meant to import all of your styles from one drawing or template to another. I do encourage the use of AECCIMPORTSTYLES, but be careful. It will override / update any existing style with the same name automatically. It is always cool to find undocumented features, but we have always been able to drag and drop individual and groups of styles from one drawing to another. To import all styles from one drawing or template to another in 2011 or prior versions simple create a new point style. Select the marker tab, check Use AutoCAD BLOCK symbol for marker, right click in block area and select browse. Set dwt or dwg at the bottom and select source. Click ok and all styles are imported to the drawing. The only difference is this does not override existing styles that already exist in the drawing. Yes AECCIMPORTSTYLES is quicker, but it will override existing styles and it only works in 2011.






























AECCIMPORTSTYLESANDSETTINGS I thought was going to be the command of the year. Finally I bring all of my default settings from one drawing to another. NOT SO FAST! I set my pipe network feature settings to label my pipes in profile to the top of the structure; I set label defaults and my object layers. Type AECCIMPORTSTYLESANDSETTINGS and nothing updated. This command only brings over a select few of command settings attached to styles. That is it. The name can fool you and now I see why it is undocumented.

Notes:

The drawing or template extension must be typed at the command line along with the name.
The drawing that is being imported must be closed.
Styles with the same name are overridden.
Steps above allow all styles to be imported for prior versions.
There are 3rd party solutions available to pull individual groups over one at a time.