A Placed Hatch Looks Different from Its Thumbnail Preview, or the Hatch Database Looks Different

Issue

You opened an existing plan with placed hatches, and the hatches now look different from how they looked in the preview slide. Or you may be noticing that the hatch database looks different and might be causeing issues when you open existing drawing files. You may have experienced this issue with one of the following hatch applications:

• Groundcovers
• Shrub Areas
• Drip areas (Area for Dripline, Drip Emitters, or Drip Spray
• Area/Volume Reference Notes (RefNotes)

Are your hatches the wrong scale? Our June 2023 update of our hatch system cleared all layers, scales, and rotations from any adjustments previously made to hatch patterns in our hatch library. More information on the update

Cause

Because of particular hatch restrictions in the old hatch system, we've created custom and unique versions of our existing hatch patterns that are slightly different from the previous versions.

Solution

Use our Save Hatch tool and click the original pattern if it still exists on your machine. The system will the list that old pattern in your User section of hatches, allowing you to still access and use it.

To align the new hatch pattern you've just placed with the preview slide, click the preview thumbnail when editing the plant, Reference Note, or drip hatch, and select the new version that best represents the old pattern. Doing so will update all existing placed hatches while also updating the slide to match what is placed.

Want to revert to our old hatch patterns from before the update?

Are you trying to get our hatch patterns back to the way they were before? If so, you're welcome to restore each of the .bak XML files that was created in the Landfx\Hatch folder. Here is how to do that:

Open your LandFX folder, and navigate to the Hatch subfolder.

You should see the following XML (.xml) files in the list:

• _detail_.xml
• _drip_.xml
• _groundcover_.xml
• _site_.xml
• _detail_.bak
• _drip_.bak
• _groundcover_.bak
• _site_.bak
• user - detail.xml
• user - drip.xml
• user - groundcover.xml
• user - site.xml

Important: It's a best practice to already have a backup of the Land F/X content – especially if you've made customizations – but make a backup of all .bak versions of the XML files. The .bak files are the original XML files that existed before our hatch update.

In that same folder, do the following:

• Delete all files with the .xml extension (example: _detail_.xml), but KEEP the user XML files (example: user – detail.xml).
• Leave the .bak versions (example: _detail_.bak).
• Rename all the .bak files to have an .xml extension (example: rename _detail_.bak to _detail_.xml).
• After renaming these .bak files, verify that the dates on the resulting XML files are stamped within the past 60 days.
• If the files are older than 60 days, you'll need to open each file in a text editing application such as Notepad and save the file right away so it gets a current save date. Also make sure you are saving these .bak files in a different place so you can pull them in as needed in the future.

Now that you've renamed the .bak files and verified their dates, Open CAD. Use our Hatch tool to open the Hatch dialog box. You should now see the old hatch structure, and you should have no problem continuing to work on past projects.

Important: We recommend using the new structure, and update your content to match. If you decide to use the old structure, you need to understand Land F/X will be replacing the _detail_.xml, _drip_.xml, _groundcover_.xml, and _site_.xml files every 60 days, so you'll want to verify those are backed up in a location you can easily access and place these files back into the LandFX\Hatch folder every 60 days. You'll also need to go into the saved XML files and make sure to save and update the file date to be within the last 60 days so the system knows to ignore it.