Restore Drawings after bad numbering

Restore Drawings after a bad numbering

This article will go over restoring drawings that are showing "Quantity Decreased" after a
numbering. A lot of times you are numbering the model and you open your drawing list and
realize that you have drawings that are fixing to be deleted because your numbering has
changed numbers for the parts you have already issued or created drawings for. We will go
over two different methods depending on how far you are in regards to updating the
drawings. Please note the example below is forced just to show how to fix a
numbering issue and restore drawings.

Drawings say "Quantity Decreased" after numbering

Open the drawing list and review the drawing changes, if you see some that say quantity
decreased like below then we will use this method.

When you see this in your drawing list the first thing you need to do is find out what part
number the drawing that was decreased changed to. To do this you need to go to Tools >
Display Log File > Numbering History, here you can see what has happened with your
parts. As you can see below i can tell that B1 changed to B5, so i need find B5 as that was my
B1 and change it back to B1.
To do this i am going to highlight the line in the Numbering History report that shows the
GUID and the change from B1 to B5, this will select B5 in the model.

From here i will go to Drawings & Reports > Numbering > Change Number >
Assembly Number, a dialog will open for the assembly number changing properties. See
below, in this dialog i will change the Position Number to 1 and then hit "Assign". In the
bottom left hand corner of your screen you should get a prompt that says "Number Changed
Successfully".
Now before we move to the next step lets say that you got the error message below. "Cannot
assign number. Group Contains Different Object"
This means that a part in the B1 position is different, if this happens it usually means your old
B1 changed to B5 and a new part you modeled became B1 to fill the gap (when using re-use
old numbers). So now what you must to do fix your drawing is change the new B1 to B6 (5 is
currently the highest number so there is not a part in B6 which is why i can move it to that
position). So go back to Drawings & Reports > Numbering > Change Number >
Assembly Number and in the popup dialog in the position number field change the
number to 6 and while selection the new B1 hit assign. That will change the B1 to B6 and
now you can move B5 to B1.

Now that you have your old B1 back in its rightful place we can now number the model and
open the drawing. The drawing will simply come back to life and will open normally with all
your changes intact that you made previously.

Drawings say "All Parts Deleted"

Now you open your drawing list and your drawings say "All Parts Deleted", this means that
they did say Quantity decreased and someone opened the drawings which updated them to
the point that all parts are now deleted on the drawing. This one is not as easy to get back
and does not always work 100% of time but can also be a life saver on the occasion.
There is no restoring this drawing but we can change an advanced option and clone from this
drawing. The first step is to go to Tools > Options > Advanced Options > then find the
Drawing Properties section. Here you will be looking for a variable
called XS_DRAWING_CLONING_IGNORE_CHECK= we will want to change this to TRUE.
This variable controls whether or not you can clone an existing drawing that has the status
of "All Parts Deleted".

Now that you have changed the advnaced option we can move on to the next step. You will
do the same process as the last method and open the Numbering History to find the part
number that you old part (in my example B4) changed to.

After i find the old part i will open the drawing list and highlight the drawing that says "All
Parts Deleted:" then hit "Clone". A new dialog will pop up, back in the model highlight B6
and then back in the Clone Dialog hit clone.
See below

After that your drawing list should have a new drawing for B6 which was cloned from the old
B4 drawing.

Those are the two methods, remember nothing is 100% guaranteed to always work but these
methods are the best options i have seen to achieve a good result consistently.

Tags:
numbering
restore drawings
bring drawings back
number
numbers changed
changing numbers