[Troy DeGroot]

I’m not positive what you have here and what you are exporting. From the markups list, you can export on CVS, XML, or PDF file types to provide a summary of the markups on a drawing. The Custom COlumns that you export through the tool manager will export only the custom columns, not the data inside them, so you can import them into other drawings if needed. This is also an XML file. I’m not sure where you have the .BAX coming or going. Let me know, I’ll try to help

[Glenn Clapson]

Hi Troy, thanks for following up.

Scenario. Create a BB mark-up that has a number of custom columns used to hold project information (see below), export this mark-up to Excel where the data is consolidated and then re-imported into BB.

Steps..

Export the mark-up to Excel via the CSV file option as you mention, perform some calculations on it.

Export the mark-up to a BAX file [CTRL+F2], it creates a Hybrid XML file (screen shot from original post) that contains all the custom columns along with their values.

Run an Excel macro that modifies this XML information in the BAX file and saves the file.

Remove the old mark-up from the PDF and re-import the updated data.

Issue..

When I re-import the mark-up using the Import option [CTRL+F3] it re-creates the mark-up correctly but the values for the custom columns that I have modified are ignored and it uses the original values.

I suspect that the XML formatted information from the custom columns in the BAX file is not used when re-importing the mark-up as there is a duplicate of this information contained with the compressed section (see original screen shot).

Hope this makes the issue clearer.

[Troy DeGroot]

Sounds like a pretty cool workflow, I’d love to see how it works when you’re finished. Sorry I can’t be more help

[David Cutler]

Your workflow is well above my experience level Glenn! Thinking about it, what I’m wondering is where is the program is finding the “original values” if you’ve modified them? If it is in the compressed section that you referred to above is there a way to modify the compressed section also? Maybe try deleting the compressed section and seeing if it will load off of the uncompressed data?

Another thought, not knowing the number of markup values that you are working with is it reasonable to key the updated data back in?

[Glenn Clapson]

Hi David,

Unfortunately its not possible to delete the compressed data as not all of the information required to re-create the mark-up is contained within the uncompressed portion.

As I’m also working with hundreds of separate objects in the mark-up it is also not possible to re-key the information either.

I’m not sure why Bluebeam presents the custom column information in an uncompressed and what appears to be an editable format in the BAX file only to ignore those values when re-importing the file back into another mark-up.

Are you aware of anyway that I can :

a) Confirm this behaviour is by design or if its is a bug.

b) What program was used to compress the data as I might be able to firstly un-compress it, modify the data and then re-compress it.

Regards

Glenn

[David Cutler]

Good afternoon Glenn,

Your file sounds like some of mine – lots of individual markups. With my workflow once I export it in a CSV format I don’t go back into Revu so I don’t know that I’m much help at this point. Perhaps @lizlarsen or @doug-mclean might jump in…

Dave

[David Cutler]

Hi @BBUser2021 ,

I know this is an old post, but I’m curious to know if you found a way to make this import work. Any luck?

Dave

[Troy DeGroot]

@BBUser2021 I’m curious if you made any progress on this as well. Thinking from a software point of view, I’ve always thought if we edited the values of markups outside of Bluebeam, how would Bluebeam know where to make the adjustment to the markup. Given the new value, do I extend the markup from the start end or the end, and how do we know what degree and direction to extend.

What you’re working on here is pretty cool and I would love to see it work if you make progress. I would reach out to the support team or maybe even the developers through the beta to ask your questions. I would think they would be interested in implementing this ability in a future release.