Beating the Layer Key hassle
Back in July I read a neat post at Richard Binnings Beside the Cursor... Blog, wrote a draft post referencing it and somehow didn’t post it. So here it is…
Richard has tackled one of the more tedious tasks for anyone upgrading between various versions of ADT/ABS.
Layer Key Styles are vital to the auto layering of AEC content and the further you go with ADT/ABS the more likely you are to customise or add keys specific to your standards or content. Then an upgrade arrives and you need to look at the Layer Key Styles, old and new, and find:
- New keys to be added: Sometimes new features or objects will have new layer keys
- Old keys to be deleted: Occasionally keys can be removed if the objects they supported have changed.
- Which of your custom keys to import/migrate.
The usual answer (for me anyway) was to copy the various keys to Excel and compare them. You still had to manually create the keys based on the results of this comparison.
Richard has tackled this task by creating some nice Excel/VBA tools to allow easy comparison of Layer Key Styles and copy/transfer of keys between them.These make it easy update of your own Layer Key Style. Have a look at this series of posts which have the code and instructions for the various tools.
- Copying LayerKeys between Layer Standards: An article about exporting layer keys to excel and performing comparison using VBA. Also included, a teaser on the following upcoming articles shown below:
- Layer Key Migration Utility Post: An article on how to use the Layer Key Copy utility. An unlocked VBA source routine that copies layer keys between layer key styles.
- Layer Key Migration Utility Update: An updated download to allow selection of DWG, DWS, and DWT files [for instead of just DWG.
