Here is a fun twist Autodesk has thrown in should Civil 3D users get too complacent with their software now that all of the bugs have been vanquished and it is now the industry benchmark for stability.
Remember that project you started last month - the one that had to go forward, but the client was indecisive to say the least about the name? You went ahead and set its project up with something that looked good and you could at least recognize it when you saw it. Last week, IT finally gets the final name and renames the project folder and announces today that comments are ready to be addressed. He tosses in that they were scheduled to be resubmitted last Tuesday, but you will still get the 3 days he had allotted you. Yes, I know that is just about EVERY project but just humor me for a minute.
You are only in a mild panic because you had set up the project to be a model of efficiency with data shortcuts everywhere with all of the references just right. The drawings are all lean and mean and you know how to query in any new stuff that you need to show this time. This STILL can be done and there is a good chance to finally impress THE BOSS with how Civil 3D can work.
And then you try to load a drawing from the project folder . . . Well there is that new name that appeared last week so that is probably the new name IT forgot to give you . . . but there are no drawings listed. In fact there are no surfaces, points alignments or anything else listed either. There are drawings in the job folder right where you left them, but the entire project structure has been dismantled. Even more bizarre, the drawing is still attached to a project. A quick trip to the project folder yields the key to what has happened. Sitting in the project.mdb file is a list of every drawing in the project . . . with the FULL path to each one embedded within. The fix is simple and effective as you fire up C3D again and there are all of your drawings, shortcuts and everything else. You are finally ready to go and put this puppy to bed but wait . . . all of those beautiful shortcuts, they are there but the links are all dead. Back at the project folder, you look in the mdb file for your shortcut paths - no luck. But those folders look promising, so you look into one and find a little xml file wth the full path again embedded for each shared item or shortcut in that folder. A look in the next folder confirms your suspicions - every one of them has the same full path embedded in its xml file.
So much for Civil 3D at least being able to shed itself of the complex project directory setup and external database structure of LDT. It would appear that a Civil 3D project is not portable to any degree unless you really like to do manual edits of xml files.
