When receiving an alignment from speckle, I may already have a different version of that alignment in my drawing. When i receive the alignment, I would want it to replace the alignment with the version that is in Speckle.
At the moment, you get an error saying there is a “Duplicate Alignment Name”, so you would have to delete the alignment before bringing in the one from Speckle.
This is not ideal because that alignment may be being used as a baseline for a corridor, and deleting the alignment will delete the baseline from the model, and the user will have to rebuild their corridor baseline from scratch. There may be other similar situations where other Civil objects are reliant upon the alignment.
Without this functionality, Speckle is simply not a viable option for sharing an alignment object between multiple Civil 3D DWG files.
Essentially, Speckle should be able to act as a complete replacement for Civil 3D Data Shortcuts, in order to share Civil 3D objects between drawings and help keep them in sync
We do support an update mechanism in Revit and I believe we’re adding it to our structural connectors as well - it makes sense to have it in Civil3D & AutoCAD too!
I’ll check with the team but if there are no technical issues, we’ll definitely add it to our roadmap.
I’ve added several new improvements to our Civil3d connector, including:
interactive reports: selects sent and received objects in your model, filter objects by state (created/updated/skipped/failed), and includes any conversion notes per object
fixes to generate a unique alignment name on receive if necessary
an Update mode on receive that deletes existing geometry to replace with new geometry
for Alignments specifically, the update mode should preserve any links with other elements that reference the alignment to be updated. This should work nicely for offset alignments as well, where only the offset value and reference point station are being changed
