After importing an XML from PlayScore2 I get the following pickup-bar:
The only thing I did was changing a wrongly recognized 2/2 time signature with 0.625 pickup into a 4/4 time signature with 1.25 pickup.
Is there a way to display the rests and beaming in the order “16th-quarter” instead of “quarter-16th” ?
There is no “force duration” present and “reset beaming” didn’t help.
I know, that I can manually override the beaming in the right hand of the piano.
But that should not be necessary in my opinion.
If I start a project from scratch, everything is grouped/sorted as expected.
The problem is that sometimes irregular length bars should be beamed to correspond to the start of a normal bar, and sometimes to correspond to the end. (Irregular bars can appear in other places, as well as genuine pickup bars.)
Dorico tries to guess which is option is “correct” but it doesn’t always guess correctly - in which case you have to edit the beaming yourself.
Rob, thanks for your explanation, I think I got the point. 
But then I would like to suggest that, at least at the beginning of a flow, Dorico should interpret an irregular bar as a pickup bar, which means that that the notes and rests are “right-aligned” and accordingly beamed/grouped. Or maybe a property would be nice, so that you can tell Dorico how to interpret the corresponding bar (to the start/to the end).
Wouldn’t that make sense?
Anyway - is there a simple way of re-formatting the rests/notes in the pickup bar of my example the way they should be?
Or do I have to enter explicit rests etc. with force duration for each staff? THX!
It might be that the existing rests have force duration turned on - if so, just turn it off. There’s a setting at Preferences > MusicXML Import that tells Dorico to import all notes and rests as though they’ve been entered with Force Duration turned on. For future use, you might want to turn that option off.
If you create a time signature with a pickup bar at the start of an empty flow, Dorico does the right thing.
It also does the right thing if you change a time signature without a pickup bar at the start of a flow, to create a pickup bar.
But if you change one irregular bar to another (which is what you did) it beams it as if it starts at the beginning of a bar. That has nothing to do with forced duration notes or rests.
I suppose Dorico doesn’t recognise that “changing one irregular bar to another, at the start of a flow” is a special case of a special case