From the course: AutoCAD Plant 3D Essential Training: Admin

Locate missing drawing files - AutoCAD Plant 3D Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Plant 3D Essential Training: Admin

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Locate missing drawing files

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- Have you ever accidentally dragged and dropped a file into a different folder, or had the project folder start to change right after the project was set up? Since all of our drawings and their locations are pathed into the project database, having a file moved in Windows means the file's no longer accessible through project manager. Let's take a look at how to relocate our missing files. So, let's take a look in our project. Now we have a drawing of 401 piping, and we have this exists in our Area 100 folder. So, let's go into Windows and make some changes in our folder structure. So, we're going to Chapter 4, and let's look at our plant 3D models. So we have our Area 100 here; now I'm going to change and make a new project folder and I'm going to call this drag and drop. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my Area 100 folder, which contains our equipment and piping, all the files that we see here. I'm going to accidentally drag this and drop it in there. Now that's very easily done in Windows, so if that's happens, let's take a look at what we've got. So now, let's try and open our 401 piping. It can't find that file. Let's go look at our equipment. Can't find that file either. So, what do we actually want to do here? So let's go back and look at our drag and drop. Now I'm going to cut, and I'm going to paste this back. That was done in error, so now let's look, if we double-click and open that, you'll see that it was able to find the file. The question marks disappeared. And look again at the 401 piping. Open the file; question marks disappeared. So, let's close these files down again. So now, let's go back and assume maybe we made this change on purpose. So I'm going to go back to Windows; now I'm going to take our drag and drop folder and delete that, and I'm going to come into Area 100. Now, let's say I took the 04 01 Piping and I'm going to cut that, and I'm going to paste that outside Area 400. Maybe that one particular drawing was not area specific. It might have been some field piping, so maybe we need to intentionally need to have that located in the plant 3D models folder So let's come down to our project. Notice it can't find it, so we all we have to do to re-path that to outside the Area 100 folder is I'm going to locate the drawing... Desktop, exercise files, chapter 4, plant 3D models, and I'm going to locate it as it is in the plant 3D models folder, and I'm going to open. So notice now the question mark is gone, and I can take this and drag it inside just the plant 3D drawing so it now sits outside Area 100 and it matches the same folder structure as we have in Windows. Now, if I go ahead and open that drawing, you can see we have no issues. So, if you have to move files using Windows, always remember to circle back around again and make sure that the new file paths have been updated in project manager. If you forget how to do this, the file won't be available to be opened inside project manager and effectively, all the data contained in that drawing, all of the tag data, piping data, PNID data, is effectively removed from your project until you link them back up again.

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