Backup and Restore Facilities for Drawings

Draft and Marine Drafting applications provide enhancements to the Datal functionality, supporting the backup and restoring of the Marine Drawing files, Picture files and Final Designer files (if used) related to SHEE and OVER elements being archived.

By default, this functionality is turned off. In order to request the OUTPUT command to take copies of the related files, the following command should be used first:

• OUTPUTDRAWINGS "foldername"

  or

• OUTPUTDRAWINGS /foldername (only if folder does not include any spaces)

This establishes the named folder as the location to which copies of all the related files will be saved. As a result, any subsequently created Datal listing would contain additional LOADDRAWINGS commands, requesting the loading of the saved related files on restore. This functionality can be turned off again using the command:

OUTPUTDRAWINGS OFF

The Datal listing may be created as usual either using the user interface, or in the Command Window using the OUTPUT command.

The file backup facilities are supported only for the OUTPUT command doing the full listing, and not just the listing of changes.

Important: It is crucial, that the SAMEREF option is always used during OUTPUT executed for backup purposes.

In order to restore the SHEE or OVER from the backup, the following actions are needed:

1. Close any current drawing.

2. Make sure, that the element being restored does not exist in the database. Delete it if necessary, and issue the SAVEWORK command.

3. Navigate to the intended owner of the restored element.

4. Make sure, that the related files to be restored are still in the location as given in the LOADDRAWINGS … FROM folder command in the DB listing macro. If it has changed, modify the folder name in the macro accordingly.

5. Run the DB listing macro

6. If everything went fine, issue the SAVEWORK command.

   Note: It is not enough to use the REPLACE option of the OUTPUT command to get rid of an existing element being replaced. This element has to be removed manually in step 1 above.

It is important, that the value of the PVNO attribute of the restored SHEE or OVER is higher than any of the values used in the past history of this element. For performance reasons the scan of the history is limited by default to the 100 database sessions. The user might want to scan more sessions, for example, if there are many users working on the same database, or if the element being restored was deleted from the database a long time ago. This can be done by defining an environment variable AVEVA_RESTORE_MAXSESSIONS before starting the application.

Example

The command

set AVEVA_RESTORE_MAXSESSIONS=1000

would request scanning of the past 1000 sessions instead of the default 100. Of course, the scan continues only until the element is found in a past session with the value of the PVNO attribute greater or equal to the one being restored, so in most cases there will not be 1000 sessions scanned.

Note: The restored drawing may not be consistent with the current state of the Design database, and needs to be validated before use. To guarantee consistency between Draft and Design databases, the existing functionality of backtracking databases in an MDB to a given stamp is recommended.