Advance Steel – Fixing Model Errors

Sometimes when opening or working on your Advance Steel models you might spot an error message in the command line saying something like “The notch 3C895 cannot be processed”.

Whilst these errors can often go unnoticed, having any errors in your file is not good. If these build up, the likelihood of noticeable problems occurring grows. How can you fix these errors and prevent future issues?

Before we tackle those specific problems, let’s remind ourselves of how to clean up some more common ones. It is good practice to use the Audit and Model Check functions on most if not all models. These will not do any harm to your model so you can run them as often as you like without risk.

The Audit function looks for data corruptions in your file. When using the Home > Checking > Audit command always say Yes to fix any errors detected. The messages that may come up in a Notepad window are generally cryptic and not much help, but the more issues listed the worse shape your file was in. Audit also purges any unused Advance Steel data from your file. It is not unusual for us to see hundreds or even thousands of bits of data purged in files we see on support. Getting rid of this data will reduce your file size and improve performance.

The Model check function looks for objects in the model that don’t make sense to Advance Steel even though the data may be valid. This could be a beam with a negative length for example; perhaps a shorten is longer than the original beam. Another case could be a hole outside the parent object. The Home > Checking > Model Check command brings up a result list, and if the result is “No errors found” then that is great. In any other case you should use the “Fix All Errors” button at the bottom of the report to fix as much as possible. If any errors remain that cannot be automatically fixed you can try to figure them out and fix them yourself. Double click on the line in the report to zoom in to the object.

However, neither of those commands will address the issue mentioned at the start. To resolve those issues you need to do the following:-

• Note the number of the object that cannot be processed – 3C895 in the image above, not the parent object which is 3C892.
• Selection Palette > Mark Object
• Enter H for Handle
• Enter the number noted above – 3C895 in this example.
• Selection > Select Marked Objects – you probably won’t be able to see it, but this selects the troublesome feature.
• Press Delete on the keyboard to remove the feature, as it wasn’t doing anything anyway.
• Repeat for each error listed.

Once finished, your model won’t be any different, but those little bits of potential trouble will now be gone. It is always worth doing this kind of housekeeping to ensure your files are clean in order to minimise any problems you may encounter.

You can watch our Fixing Model Errors in Advance Steel video tutorial by clicking on the link below:

You can watch all of our previous Advance Steel webinars through our youtube channel