How to use the new Keyboard Shortcuts Dialog and Tips

Luke Johnson

UPDATE: Check out my Supertip post at https://wrw.is/2010/04/supertip-3-keyboard-shortcuts.html

The Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Revit Architecture 2010 has generally been received quite well. I am a little annoyed that I recently spent quite some time creating some parametric truss families, and now they give us the Structural tools! In reality though, it is a welcome and helpful update.

The new Keyboard Shortcuts dialog is great – it allows for easy viewing and updating of shortcuts. However, it does not allow you to ‘sort’ the priority of shortcuts that begin with the same letter. Here are a few tips on using the new dialog:

  • To open the dialog, go to the View tab, User Interface button, Keyboard Shorcuts…
  • To import your old shorcuts, click on Import, change the ‘Files of type’ drop down list to *.txt files, browse to your ‘Program’ folder and select the ‘KeyboardShortcuts.txt’ file. You can choose to overwrite or merge your shortcuts.
  • To ensure that a given shortcut works with a single key configuration (ie. Move triggered by M-Space, remove all other shortcuts beginning with ‘M’ and reassign them.
  • TIP – You can use the ‘number’ keys and assign shortcuts to these! If you are a gamer, it will be quite natural for you to select the number keys to trigger various weapons, powers or actions. Now, you can set Move to 1, Copy to 2, Rotate to 3 and so forth. These are your powers now!
  • TIP – By clicking the ‘shortcuts’ column heading in this dialog, it will sort the commands by their related shortcuts. This is a quick and easy way to see if there are any duplicates.

Enjoy the new Keyboard Shorcuts dialog and feel free to post any tips or comments you may have.PS – Here are some relevant AUGI forum links for your perusal:Help w/ new keyboard shortcuts?Subscription Advantage Pack for Revit

Exclusive to Autodesk Subscription Customers: 60 AutoCAD Tips in 60 minutes

Luke Johnson

Reposted from an email I received today from Autodesk. Direct link to registration page here.
“Join Autodesk’s technical support experts for our latest live webcast exclusively for Autodesk Subscription customers. With so much going on in our everyday drawing life we have a tendency to get in an AutoCAD rut. This webcast will show you a variety of tips that to help improve your productivity, including:

  • Parametric Design
  • Dynamic Blocks
  • PDF Underlay
  • Plot Settings
  • File Migration
  • UI Enhancements
  • Measurement Tools
  • File Save and Recovery
  • Layer Management

Don’t miss this exclusive seminar. Register now to get all the information you need to be successful with Autodesk AutoCAD”

FIXED – NAS problem with Revit Central File access (oplocks) FIX

Luke Johnson

We use a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo as our fileserver. Recently we started to experience some annoying and disturbing error messages, such as:

  • Access to {path}{CentralFileName}-backupeperms.dat was denied
  • Encountered a hardware I/O error while accessing {path}{CentralFileName}-backuprequests.dat
  • An unknown error occurred while accessing {path}{CentralFileName}.rvt

This resulted in some loss of work and lots of annoyance.
I discussed the issue with our local reseller and they basically recommended I stop using the NAS and use a different share. But I didn’t want to do that! However, it did seem likely that the problem was with the NAS. I played around with some settings in the NAS setup…and I think I found the answer. It was to do with ‘oplocks’. I needed to disable the oplocks for the share, and the problem went away! How do you do it?

  1. In the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo ‘Frontview’ administration page, go to the ‘Shares’ page.
  2. Go to the ‘Share Options’ for the share you are using to store Revit Central Files.
  3. Scroll down the bottom to ‘Opportunistic Locking’ and disable the ‘Enable oplocks for this share’ tick box.

What are ‘oplocks’? According to the utility:
Opportunistic locking (oplocks) can enhance CIFS performance by allowing files residing on this ReadyNAS to be cached locally on the Windows client, eliminating network latency when files are repeatedly accessed.
This definition indicates that oplocks could certainly have caused this issue. Since disabling the option, we have experienced none of the aforementioned errors.
Have you experienced this problem? If so, I hope my solution helped you.
Also, it looks like I haven’t been the only one with an issue like this:
http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/open-enterprise-server/oes-platform-independent/oes-client-windows/371285-revit-2009-64-bit-opportunistic-file-locking.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/samba@lists.samba.org/msg86717.html
http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/open-enterprise-server/oes-netware/oes-nw-install-upgrade/369243-cifs-xp-pro-x64.html
http://community.riverbed.com/rvrb/board/message?board.id=24&thread.id=30
“Specific applications known to exhibit this behavior include Solidworks and AutoDesk Revit, as demonstrated by your experience.”

EDIT Associated issue may result in error such as:
This issue was with a user not being able to write to a particular file that Revit uses to maintain the state of the central file.
\pathdeltas.datpath
deltas.dat>