Has this ever happened to you? You’ve been working on a design file for weeks. You’ve filled it with elements to your heart’s content. One fine morning, you load the file in MicroStation, and your eyes open wide in dismay. Hundreds of elements are missing from your design! What happened? Your design file fell pray to file corruption.

What you may not know is there’s a good chance that your elements are still in the design file. How could this be? To explain, let us take a small excursion. Think of a design file as a gigantic skyscraper; think of each floor of the skyscraper as a MicroStation element; and think of MicroStation itself as an elevator. To arrive at the bottom floor from the top floor of the skyscraper, an elevator has to first pass through each floor in between. MicroStation opens a design file in a similar fashion. To open a design file, MicroStation first scans the file from the top floor (in other words, from the first element in the file) all the way to the bottom floor (to the last element in the file). Just like an elevator would expect to find the bottom floor at the bottom of a skyscraper, MicroStation expects to find an “end-of-design marker” at the bottom of a design file. Simply put, the end-of-design marker tells MicroStation that the end of the file has been reached and that there aren’t any more elements to display. For various reasons (network glitches, hardware malfunctions, application errors and more), an erroneous “end-of-design marker” can wind up in the design file somewhere other than at the actual end of the file. The result: all elements after the erroneously placed end-of-design marker are no longer recognized or displayed by MicroStation!

The easiest and safest way to bring back your missing elements is by using Axiom’s FileFixer – the utility that lets you fix any MicroStation file automatically!

In this technical bulletin, I’ll show you how to set up FileFixer to recover elements that lie past an erroneous end-of-design file marker.

1. Select FileFixer from the Axiom menu [located on the MicroStation menu bar].

   

2. FileFixer’s main dialog box shows up. Make sure the repair “Mode” pull-down menu is set to “Automatic Design File Repair”.

   

3. Next, click on the <Edit List> button to select the MicroStation file that is missing elements. For the purposes of this article, we created and selected the file “eod-marker.dgn”.

   

4. Then, on the FileFixer menu bar, choose the “Options” menu and then choose “Repair”.

   

5. Once in the “Repair Options” dialog box, select the “Element” category.

   

6. Having selected the “Element” category, check the option “Recover elements past the end-of-design marker”. Click <OK> afterwards.

   

7. Back in FileFixer’s main dialog box, click <Start> to recover all the missing elements automatically.

   

8. After processing the design file, FileFixer prompts you to click the <OK> button. Notice that the dialog box states “Repaired files have .fix extension”. This is because FileFixer repairs a copy of your design file by default. This is a precaution to protect you in the unlikely event that the repair produces results that are less than perfect. You’ll always have the original file to go back to!

   

Use Axiom’s Fence Undelete to recover every one of the deleted elements.

1. Start Fence Undelete from the Axiom menu. The Fence Undelete tool palette comes up.

   

2. Click on the tombstone icon to view all the deleted elements that did not make it back after using Undo.
   

   The icon in red allows users to view a file’s deleted elements in a temporary design file.

3. A temporary file is created that holds all the deleted elements. To recover the elements, click on Fence Undelete’s Fence icon (below in red). Place the fence around the deleted elements. You can also select elements individually.
4. Then, click on the Restore Fence Contents icon (below in red) and accept by clicking your mouse inside the view. You’ll notice that the elements disappear from the temporary file. They are being restored to the design file from which they were deleted.
   

   The icon in red allows users to restore deleted elements to the design file from which they were deleted.

5. To return to the original design file, click on the Return to Original File icon (again, below in red). You’ll now see that your elements are back in place where they belong.
   

   The icon in red allows users to return to the design file that now has the recovered elements in it.

Unlike MicroStation’s Undo command, Fence Undelete can bring back deleted elements even after you have closed MicroStation! This only requires that the file not be com-pressed after the elements have been deleted.

Accidental, duplicate elements are a fact of life for nearly all MicroStation sites. They cause plotting problems, selection trouble (elements that take forever to select with the Area Selection tool, because MicroStation may be selecting dozens or even hundreds of duplicates hidden under those you intended to select), deletion difficulties (“I just deleted that element – and it came right back!”), unexpected results with third-party automation software that has no idea that the area you asked it to process includes numerous duplicate elements that you didn’t know about and did not want processed, unnecessarily large files padded with duplicate elements and a host of other site-specific problems.

Duplicate elements come from many sources and come in varied forms. That is, there are many ways elements can be considered “duplicates”. Obviously, there are the simple cases of “perfect duplicates.” From a programming point of view, those are the easiest to locate and handle. However, there are many other ways elements can be considered duplicates from a production standpoint.

In this technical bulletin, I address one of the more annoying forms of duplicate or near-duplicate elements: linear elements fully overlapped by other, longer linear elements. The overlapped elements could be significantly smaller than their overlapping counterparts, making them hard, sometimes practically impossible, to locate without the assistance of advanced software. The problem is solved using the latest addition to Axiom’s Duplicate Element Remover. The following steps demonstrate exactly how to get rid of this type of duplicate element.

1. Select Duplicate Element Remover from the Axiom pull-down menu [located on the MicroStation menu bar].

   

2. Duplicate Element Remover’s main dialog appears. Your active design file will be selected by default. To process a different file (or multiple files), click the <Select…> button. For the purposes of this article, we will work with a test design file, overlap.dgn.

   

3. To begin, we will load Duplicate Element Remover’s default settings. From the main dialog box, choose “Settings | Reset to factory defaults…” and answer <Yes> to the confirmation box that appears.
4. Once the factory settings are restored, go to “Settings Change Settings…”

   

5. In the Category list, choose “Tolerances”.
6. Turn on the checkbox next to “Remove linear elements overlapped by longer elements?” A few other options will automatically be activated. This is okay.

   

7. Now, keep in mind that it is possible for lines which look like perfect duplicates to be less-than-perfect duplicates if they each contain different non-graphic information – information you can’t necessarily see. Attribute linkage information is a good example of this. For the purposes of this bulletin, we are not concerned with attribute linkages. In order for Duplicate Element Remover to treat near-duplicate elements with different attribute linkages as perfect duplicates, simply set the settings under the “Attribute linkages” Category as in the image below or make adjustments according to your own preference.

   

8. Then, on the same dialog box, choose <OK> to go back to the main dialog box.
9. Back in the main dialog box, check the box next to “Generate report only”. In “Generate report only” mode, Duplicate Element Remover will not delete any elements – it will simply create reports of what duplicate elements it found.

   

10. Next, uncheck the box next to “Interactive mode”.
    Note: In this article, we run Duplicate Element Remover in non-interactive mode. In non-interactive mode, Duplicate Element Remover will process all your elements automatically without requiring you to make a decision for each one. Using Duplicate Element Remover in non-interactive mode is a great way to quickly see how many duplicate elements are in your files.

    

    On the other hand, interactive mode gives you the finest level of control. In this mode, Duplicate Element Remover will let you “visit” each duplicate element it finds. While visiting each duplicate element, you can choose to delete it or not. This is a great way to get a hands-on feel for what types of duplicate elements exist in your files. In everyday operation, you can choose whether you want to run in interactive or non-interactive mode.

11. Press <Start> to begin processing the design file.
12. After processing the design file, Duplicate Element Remover creates two report files:
    • A text report file (*.trf) which is a simple text file listing all the duplicate elements found; and
    • A design report file (*.drf), my personal favorite. Design report files graphically show you exactly what duplicate elements were found, presented in their relative location to the other elements in your file. You can think of design report files as “duplicate element X-ray glasses.” With them, you can essentially look right into a file and see only its duplicate elements.
13. To see what duplicate elements Duplicate Element Remover found, press the <View Design Report File> button. The green elements are the duplicates; the white (color 0) elements are all the non-duplicate elements in the file, included (and turned white) to distinguish them from the duplicate elements.
    
    
14. If you agree that the green elements shown in the design report file are valid duplicates, process the file once again with the “Generate report only“ box unchecked, and, at your discretion, process the file in either interactive or non-interactive mode. After this step, you will find that your duplicate elements are gone. That’s all it takes!

Bored of having to re-select the same elements over and over again, especially when you have carefully selected a group of components and then click on the view window deactivating the selection?

You can key in the function “choose previous” and your previous selection will be activated!

But, what you may not know is that by holding down the <Ctrl> and <Shift> keys while dragging the selection pointer, you can select the elements inside the selection area and elements that merely cross it. This is very helpful for quickly selecting elements whose endpoints intersect an element that you do not want included in the selection set (in this example, this element is the green box shown below).

By holding down <Ctrl> and <Shift> while dragging the element selection tool over the elements you want to select, you can quickly include elements that are completely inside the selection area and elements that merely overlap the selection area. It beats <Ctrl> clicking on each element!

Do you have new users that don’t really get the IntelliTrim tool yet? Here is an easy way to trim several elements very quickly using the MicroStation Trim Element command along with the PowerSelector tool. [Note: You can also use the regular Element Selection tool to select multiple elements. Just hold down the <Ctrl> key while you select your elements.]

1) First, pick the PowerSelector tool and select the elements you want to trim.

Select the elements using your favorite selection tool. For this tip, we will be using PowerSelector.

Select all elements you want to be able to trim.

2) Next, click on the Trim Elements tool.

After you select the elements you want to trim, select the Trim Elements tool from the “Modify” toolbar.

You will notice that once you select the Trim Elements tool, the selected elements will no longer be “highlighted.” Don’t worry, that’s okay!

3) Next, click on the portion of the element you want to trim.

The “X”s correspond to the areas I want to trim. Notice how the elements trim in the graphic on the right. Try this a few times to get the hang of it.

Once you are done, you do not have to unselect the elements. They are automatically dropped from the selection set. That’s it!

To align these off-kilter text elements, select the “Align Edges” tool located within the “Manipulate” toolbox.

Then set the “Align” setting to “Left” in the “Tool Settings” dialog box.

Next, select the text that you want the other elements to align to.

Accept it with another data point and then select each element whose left edge you want to align to the original element selected.

Now click the <OK> button on the dialog box, and your cell library will be converted. Easy as pie.

If you make a mistake by selecting an element you do not want to align, just reset once and the element moves back to its original position. Then you can continue to select more elements. When the last element you want to move has been processed, accept it with a data point and then reset to start over with a new set of elements or select another tool. Very slick.