Circular chain of references

Circular chain of references

Circular Chain of References are, putting it mildly, frustrating. Once you get the message it can seem as though your model has been paralyzed.
There is a solution. First thing to do is to try and work out where the chain is.
An example of this was on a project where trying to delete any thing connected to the floor slab would come up with the Circular Chain of References error message. It was obvious that the problem was to do with the floor slab but we couldn't edit or delete it. 

• In a 3d view I hid the walls and tried to delete each floor seperatly to see which of the floor/roof slabs where causing the circular reference.
• The Ground Floor slab was referencing the First floor slab, this was referencing the Roof slab and the Roof slab was referencing the  First floor slab.
• I selected the two referencing elements together and pressed delete. I did get a warning so I clicked Expand and selected two elements that had to go (door and a wall) and clicked Delete Instances.

In this instance it was decided to redraw the elements, although we could have copied and pasted from an older model file that did not have this problem.