Tutorial 15: Revision Tracking

Change a released panel and let ConstructiVision remember everything — why it changed, when it changed, and every drawing it ever was.

Once a panel is drawn to specification and released for fabrication, changes stop being design development and become revisions — tracked for budgetary and legal reasons. ConstructiVision tracks them at two levels, both automatic-first: a revision log in the drawing itself (number, date, and your reason, with a revision stamp on the final sheet), and revision files on disk — every panel save keeps the previous drawing as a complete sibling file, so editing a panel never destroys the revision you already issued. This lesson exercises both levels once, end to end; the full field notes live in Track revisions.

Note

A browser version covers part of this lesson. Open it here — it lists exactly which steps it does not cover, so you know what to come back to AutoCAD for.

What you will build

From the finished panel TP08-12:

  • Revision 1 in the panel’s revision log — number and date stamped automatically, your reason typed once — with the revision stamp placed at the top of the sheet;

  • a round trip through the panel’s saved revisions on disk: Revert to Previous Revision steps the whole drawing back one save, Restore Next Revision brings it forward again — undo and redo across saves, nothing ever deleted;

  • a printed revision history — the change, its date, and the reason, as a report.

Before you start

  • The advanced track builds on the finished panel thread: complete the panel lessons through Tutorial 9: Brace Points & Expansion Gaps. (Tutorial 14 is not required — this lesson stands on the finished panel alone.)

  • Have TP08-12 open inside its project — click Open Drawing and pick it from the project folder.

  • The panel must have been saved at least once; if you have followed the thread, every lesson’s closing redraw has saved it already.

Tip

Joining here? Download the lesson solution — the finished TP08-12 — and place it in the project folder you created in Tutorial 1 before opening it. The revision files this lesson walks through are kept as siblings of the panel drawing, so the lesson wants the drawing inside its project folder.

Lesson

Step 1 — See what every save already keeps

Before recording anything, look at what has been recorded for you all along. Open the project folder in Windows Explorer and look next to TP08-12.dwg: if you have followed the thread, a family of numbered siblings — TP08-12.bak001, TP08-12.bak002, … — sits alongside it, one per save, higher numbers more recent. Each is a complete drawing: the panel exactly as it was when that save happened. (If you just downloaded the solution instead, there are none yet — your first save in Step 2 creates the first one.)

This is the disk level of revision tracking, and it is an invariant, not a best effort: when a save cannot keep the previous drawing — folder read-only, disk full — the save is refused rather than allowed to overwrite it. You have seen its one-line receipts all through the curriculum: every closing redraw ends with [CV-REV] lines on the command line reporting the prior revision rotating to its .bak slot and the new save landing.

Step 2 — Make a design change and record Revision 1

The scenario every real revision starts with: the architect calls. The right-hand window from Tutorial 6 — W2 — needs to be wider.

  1. Click Standard Opening on the ConstructiVision toolbar. On row 2 (the W2 opening), change Width from 6'0 to 8'0, and click OK.

  2. The panel redraws — and because a drawn panel just changed, ConstructiVision asks:

    This Drawing has been revised. Do you want to add a Revision Stamp to the drawing? (The original Drawing Date will not be changed.)

    Click Yes.

  3. The Revision History dialog opens — a ten-row log with the first row already filled in: Rev # 1, today’s date, and the cursor waiting in the Reason field. The number and date are assigned for you and cannot be edited; the reason is the only thing you type. Enter Window W2 widened to 8'-0" and click OK.

  4. The redraw completes and the panel saves. Two new things are on the sheet: the revision log entry in the drawing, and the revision stamp — the newest revision number and date — placed in the clear band at the top of the sheet. And in the project folder, a fresh .bak sibling now holds the panel as it was before the change — Revision 1 did not cost you the original.

Note

Revisions begin the day after the drawing does. The stamp prompt appears the first time a panel changes on a later date than the drawing date in its title block — a change made the same day the panel was drawn is design development, folded into the original, and nothing is offered to record. So if you finished Lesson 9 earlier today, this step’s prompts will not appear yet: the change still draws and saves (and Steps 3–5 work regardless — the disk level tracks every save), and the recorder will greet you the first time you change the panel on another day. Once the log holds its first entry, the date no longer matters: every later change opens the Revision History dialog directly, so no revision slips by unrecorded.

Note

Contrast with Tutorial 14: links track saves, revisions track changes. The no-change save that marked a linked panel stale in the last lesson never disturbs the revision log — only an actual change to the panel’s data wakes the recorder.

Step 3 — Read the log back

Click Revision History on the toolbar. The dialog opens showing the stored log: row 1 reads 1, today’s date, and your reason. Because the drawing is saved and unchanged, no new row is offered — there is nothing to record, and recording is deliberate: a row only enters the log when you type a reason into it. Close the dialog with Cancel; a look at the log costs nothing.

Step 4 — Step back: Revert to Previous Revision

Now the move the whole system exists for. Suppose the architect calls back: the wider window is on hold — the client wants to see the panel as issued.

Open the CV pull-down menu and click Revert to Previous Revision (typing CV-REVERT at the command line does the same). Hands off while it runs: the panel saves, closes, the drawing files swap on disk, and TP08-12 reopens — as the previous revision. W2 is 6’-0” wide again, the log is empty, the stamp is gone: this is the panel exactly as Lesson 9 left it.

Nothing was deleted. The command line’s [CV-REV] REVERT line tells the story: the revised drawing was parked in a forward (.fwd) redo slot, and the newest backup swapped in as the current drawing. Revert is an undo across saves, done purely by moving complete drawing files between slots — which is why the .bak siblings from Step 1 matter.

Step 5 — Step forward: Restore Next Revision

The client approves after all. On the CV menu, click Restore Next Revision (or type CV-RESTORE): the same swap runs the other way, and the panel reopens at Revision 1 — the 8’-0” window, the log entry, and the stamp all back.

Try Restore Next Revision once more: ConstructiVision refuses with “No forward revision to restore … you are at the newest revision.” The stacks are bounded and safe — Revert with no backups is refused the same way, so you can never walk off either end.

Step 6 — Print the revision history

The log is also a deliverable — the record of each change, its date, and the reason, printed for the people who track cost and responsibility:

  • For the open panel, click Program Options on the toolbar and choose Print Revision History.

  • For any set of panels at once, use Batch Utilities — the dialog you drove in Tutorial 13: Materials List & the Panel Book — select the panels, and run its Print Revision History operation.

The output is a text report, one line per revision. The details — and every other rule of the revision system — are in Track revisions.

Check your result

Tip

This lesson’s result lives partly outside the drawing — the revision files are siblings on disk, and the recorded reason is your own words — so there is no CV-CHECK-LESSON15 command: the single-drawing lesson checker has nothing it could reliably grade here. Check the outcomes themselves against the list below.

You should now be able to verify all of the following:

  • Revision History shows Rev # 1 with today’s date and your reason, and reopening it on the clean drawing offers no new row.

  • The sheet carries the revision stamp — revision number and date — in the band at the top of the sheet.

  • The project folder holds numbered TP08-12.bak… siblings, and each is a complete drawing — higher numbers more recent.

  • Revert to Previous Revision reopens the panel as issued — 6’-0” window, no log entry, no stamp — and Restore Next Revision brings Revision 1 back intact; one more Restore is refused with “you are at the newest revision.”

If a Revert or Restore is refused when you expect it to run, the log and file rules are in Track revisions — including why an empty .bak or .fwd stack is the normal state at either end of the walk.

Where next

  • Reference depth: Track revisions — the ten-entry log, the save-abort invariant that protects revisions, and every prompt’s exact behavior.

  • What revisions drive downstream: Tutorial 14: Linked Panels — a saved change to an origin panel is what marks its linked copies out of date.

  • Batch printing: Print a panel book — Batch Utilities, where the revision history prints for a whole panel set.

  • A companion video for this lesson is planned alongside the written curriculum.