How to change several normal cells to shared cells?

There is a change request to have this ability CR # 321573

Any workaraound?, plus, how can I rename a shared cell?

"I'm not sure how much performance gain there is to be had.  While the file size is smaller those instances still have to be expanded into system/gpu memory to be displayed and manipulated.  So while the storage foot print is smaller and load faster I suspect the amount of RAM used by Microstation should be about the same regardless if they are shared or normal.   Perhaps someone from Bentley could speak to that."

Shared cells will make a big difference in terms of memory and display performance, in particular when they contain solids as it means we only need to facet/cache the geometry for 1 element instead of N elements.

It's unfortunate that we don't have a command to turn normal cells into shared cells...but saving to DWG to try to achieve this is not a good work-around.

HTH

-B

* Oops...somehow I've edited David's post...sorry David. :(

Never had that happen.  Normally they just get deleted.  :-)

Could change cell to shared cell be done thru vba coding ?

only by by saving all cell attributes , creating a new shard cell with that attributes and deleting the old normal cell.

but there are a lot of side effects (db-links?, new X-Attributes, new EC-Attributes) not an easy approach and an C++/MDL would be quite faster.

If you click on 'Use Shared Cells" in the Cells dialog it will also populate the cell library with cells placed in the active file. If you open a dwg file all the cells are available in the Cells dialog as if a cell library is attached. This is extremely useful as you don't need to create a new cell library. It's common to receive files that are full of cells. Of course you never get the associated cell library with them. If they are shared cells (or if you could convert them to shared cells) then you don't have to build a cell library. You have immediate access to cells without a cell library.

Another scenario it is useful for is when you are creating cells on the fly by grouping elements (Edit>Group). You then give it a name and voila you have a cell. But it's not a shared cell so you don't have access to use it as you would a shared cell.

I would find this CR very useful.

If you click on 'Use Shared Cells" in the Cells dialog it will also populate the cell library with cells placed in the active file. If you open a dwg file all the cells are available in the Cells dialog as if a cell library is attached. This is extremely useful as you don't need to create a new cell library. It's common to receive files that are full of cells. Of course you never get the associated cell library with them. If they are shared cells (or if you could convert them to shared cells) then you don't have to build a cell library. You have immediate access to cells without a cell library.

Another scenario it is useful for is when you are creating cells on the fly by grouping elements (Edit>Group). You then give it a name and voila you have a cell. But it's not a shared cell so you don't have access to use it as you would a shared cell.

I would find this CR very useful.