Topic: Detach Not Found Xrefs

[ELOQUINTET]

Hey guys

often we'll get drawing from architects which are missing xrefs and we print the set out only to find a huge xref path in  and a dime size drawing in the corner. Is there a way we can through a script maybe run a lisp routine that would detach all not found xrefs in a bunch of drawings. I found this thread here but I'm not sure if this is close enough to be tweaked for not found instead of unloaded xrefs? Can somebody help?

Previous Thread

[deegeecees]

Xref manager does that. I think.

[ELOQUINTET]

my boss was just looking at that and while it identifies which xrefs are not loaded i'm not sure you can detach them. something else i noticed is that i don't have therefrence manager on my machine but others do, maybe i uninstalled it. i went to autodesk and downloaded it but when i try to install it it says i need to have a 2002 based installtion, i have 2008. I thought maybe it's on the disc but don't see it in tools and utilities. where is it? what i actually need is a way to make the missing path info smaller so i have knowledge of it later. is there a variable which controls the size?

[Jeff_M]

This is the file that the shortcut points to:
"C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2008\AdRefMan.exe"

[sinc]

Sounds like there might be some confusion going on here...

The XREF manager no longer exists in 2008 (actually, I think it does, it's just hidden, like the old MTEXT editor, but there's no reason to use it).  Instead, the Image Manager and XREF Manager have been combined into a single External References Manager.  You can call up this manager by typing either XREF or IMAGE.

In the External References Manager, you can simply select the XREFs that are flagged as "Unloaded", right-click, and select Detach.  The standard SHIFT and CTRL behavior applies when selecting multiple XREFs in this manager, so you can select all Unloaded XREFs and detach them all at once.  This is built-in to Autocad.

Then there is also the Reference Manager.  That is a separate program that should have been installed at the same time you installed Autocad.  You must go to the Start Menu to run it.  If it didn't get installed, then it sounds like something went wrong in the installation.  At least, I don't remember an option for disabling the installation, unless you did a custom installation and deselected it explicitly.

The Reference Manager is useful if you need to edit XREFs in a whole bunch of drawings at once.  But if you are only concerned about one drawing, the External References Manager should work just fine.

It can get confusing, since all these things - XREF manager, External References Manager, and Reference Manager - have such similar names, and people sometimes mix up the names, especially if they aren't familiar with all three.

[ELOQUINTET]

i want the ability to do it on a bunch of drawings at once without opening them. I know about the external ref dialogue, that's not what i'm after. i would actually just like to find a way to decrease the size of the missing path so when i plot i still get a readable drawing and can determine whether I need the missing xrefs or not.

[KewlToyZ]

Something I have been curious about as well.
To batch the process out has a few issues.
One of them primarily being that nested XREF's won't remove until the drawing that has them has them removed.
If the file doesn't exist I find I have to take a blank drawing and name with it the ref title to trick the 2008 XREF Manager to remove the reference. If there is a way around it, I'm going to have to read these links, thanks guys!

[KewlToyZ]

Additionally nested references will still error if nested in too many other references when trying to remove.
More or less creating an empty file for every reference and making multiple passes trying to remove them would be awfully painful.

There has to be a way to simply remove the entry from the file database or something outside the drawing environment without ruining the file?

Would be nice for images as well.
Both generate extra network traffic in a production environment and slow downs in production when considering 2 terabytes of files and 100 machines working with them.