LDD: strange problem with groups

[tmctiger]

Hi Guys,

I have a somewhat strange problem using the LDD. I did some search but couldn't find something about:

Occasionally I use groups to groups some bricks together. And I occasionally delete the the bricks. And I often do not delete the grouping prior to the bricks deletion. And this seems to be the problem: LDD seems to be not able to handle this correct, the result is an empty group. Of course you can delete this group afterwards, but if you do this to often you end up with a huge (infinite?) amount of empty groups you can not delete.

This wouldn't be that great problem, but the LDD considers these groups and suddenly needs a huge amount of RAM (a 4000 Brick LDD, usually 450MB of RAM consumption, suddenly consumes over 1.5GB) forcing the LDD to react very slowly when opening, saving the file and importing a model to this file (up to over a minute). --> so you end up with a somewhat corrupted LDD file you can't use efficient anymore.

So my questions are:

1. Did anyone of you also have this problem?

2. Is there a solution to repair this file (e.g. loading the LDD into another CAD tool which ignores the groups and then reexporting it to LDD?)

I you want I can upload the file in question later this evening.

Thanks in advance and BR,

Guenther

[Calabar]

I don't remember that deleting empty groups was a huge problem, but it could become boring when you need to copy groups inside other groups to maintain the group hierarchy.

The faster way to remove groups probably is to open the LXF file (it is a zip file, open it with a file archiver), access the lxfml file (a text file written by LDD using XML markup language) and remove the content inside the <GroupSystem></GroupSystem> tags. Save the file and open it again with LDD, to check if everything is fine.

[tmctiger]

Hi @Calabar,

yes you are right, deleting a single empty group is indeed no problem, but it seemed that my group hierarchy got corrupted and I ended up with thousands when not even more empty groups. due to this fact even deleting a single group will take up to 30 seconds ...

Thanks for the tip that LXF is a archive. This will help me to solve the Problem. Many thanks for your input!

BR,

Guenther

[tmctiger]

8 hours ago, Calabar said:

I don't remember that deleting empty groups was a huge problem, but it could become boring when you need to copy groups inside other groups to maintain the group hierarchy.

The faster way to remove groups probably is to open the LXF file (it is a zip file, open it with a file archiver), access the lxfml file (a text file written by LDD using XML markup language) and remove the content inside the <GroupSystem></GroupSystem> tags. Save the file and open it again with LDD, to check if everything is fine.

Hi @Calabar,

your tip worked like a charm. Thanks! I could restore my file to the vanilla condition without any groups.   Btw.: LDD added 38629 groups in the file ...

BR,

Guenther

[Calabar]

Glad it helps! 

[M2m]

LDD not deleting empty groups is a known issue I think. So heads up for the tip to edit the text file directly. Also LDD doesn't really handle adding to subgroups property I think - that is it will destroy all hierarchies you may have if you add a group of groups to a new group. 

[LegoAcklay]

 

That is good to know! Had a the same sort of problem once with the groups.

The faster way to remove groups probably is to open the LXF file (it is a zip file, open it with a file archiver), access the lxfml file (a text file written by LDD using XML markup language) and remove the content inside the <GroupSystem></GroupSystem> tags. Save the file and open it again with LDD, to check if everything is fine.

Edited July 13, 2017 by LegoAcklay