Request Some Enhancements

I’ve been helping a customer solve an issue in Civil 3D 2011. They have a user working on a plat map. Their standard is to have one drawing with the parcels and another sheet drawing that xrefs the parcel drawing and contains the parcel labels. The issue is that all of the labels in the drawing keep disappearing. It happened multiple times upon opening the sheet drawing with an ugly command line error that looked like this:

Enhanced reference audit problems for database
“T:\ \ENGR\SHEETS\Plat\SH-FP04.dwg”
(in the form: “Name, Reason, Repair Method”):

AECC_PARCEL_FACE_LABEL [876B], Broken reference, Remove
AECC_PARCEL_SEGMENT_LABEL [87BD], Broken reference, Remove

It took me a long time to even reproduce, let alone find the reason for the error. It turned out to be something along the lines of moving parcel vertices in the parcel drawing quite a distance reproduced the error. Effectively, the parcel’s handle is changed and the label has no object to reference. I’m sure there are other actions which can be taken with parcel segments to create the error, but I didn’t really need to look for others.

One straightforward solution would be to label in the parcel drawing. Those labels don’t seem to exhibit the same problem, even when the parcel vertices are moved a long way. Easy. Except… then you can’t control which parcels are labeled in your sheets, meaning you get half cutoff labels that you don’t want to see which leads you down the workaround spiral.

So as far as I can tell, there isn’t really a good solution.  While looking into the problem I discovered that lots of people have trouble with parcels, especially labeling and referencing them. Parcels aren’t full fledged project objects. They can’t be used with data shortcuts or Vault and could use a little bit of work.

Luckily, Autodesk isn’t against the idea of giving its customers what they need! If you have a subscription contract you have access to web support. And, through web support you can make a support request for an enhancement, which Autodesk defines as, “An idea or suggestion for a new feature or documentation or a request for an enhancement to an existing feature or documentation.”