Xref bind with Insert option

[Roby Geiger]

Has anyone figured out how to automate xref bind using the insert
option, I need this to complete a project to automate the saving of
revision levels of drawings.

thanks

Roby

[Mark McDonough]

Relative to the "Insert Option" for binding XREFs, I've always been
surprised (no... amazed) by the omission of an "Explode" option, to bring
the XREF drawings in exploded, as can be done with the DDINSERT command.

Consider this: You need to collapse all XREFs into a single drawing. Use
XREF Bind with the "Insert" option. Now, your drawing becomes unnecessarily
large because not only do you have the physical entities in the drawing,
there is also a large "block reference" for each dwg that was brought in.
To unbloat the file size, you need to explode each inserted "XREF" dwg, then
purge.

When people need to do this in our company, we recommend they detach all
XREFs, then insert each of them with the DDINSERT command with "Explode"
checked on. In the ideal situation the XREF Bind option would simply have
an "Insert exploded" option to eliminate all these extra steps.

Of course, we tell our CAD users to avoid the regular XREF Bind option like
the plaque... who wants all the overhead and multiplicity of long,
concatenated layer names, style names, etc, with crazy symbols in the
names... very messy.

As to automating the process as you want, it would be easy to write a lisp
routine that would get the names of all attached XREFs, then detach them and
insert them exploded.

Mark McDonough
mmcdo...@sasaki.com
http://www.sasaki.com

Roby Geiger wrote in message <36c701bf...@adesknews.autodesk.com>...

[Morten Warankov]

Hi Roby,

Collecting XREF's into your main model is not always the best way of
preserving revision history.
In multi-discipline models (where each discipline is referencing each other)
you will have to save each drawing several times with your method.

Several of our clients using our application XREFCLEAN, saves the current
drawing set to a specific directory, let say 'AppDesign' or 'AsBuilt', but
keeps the original XREF's as separate drawings. With this method you keep
the original XREF hierarchy, but isolates it from the production model.
Seek our web site http://www.abacus.no for XREFCLEAN to assist you if this
sounds interesting.

Hope this helps,

Mortenw

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