Topic: A. I will periodically purge and audit my drawings.

[MP]

Not a standard per se but practical advice. Thoughts?

[Dent Cermak]

I have had people look me in the eye and tell me purging the drawing jas no real effect on the drawing. Then they ask me why my drawings load faster, plot faster and are smaller than theirs. You can't teach a rock to fly without a slingshot.
It should be common practice to purge ALL drawings before sending them out. It should be a habit that the last step to complete a drawing is to purge it.

[Slim©]

What would you want "layers, linetypes, blocks, etc." sitting aroung in your drawing?
Put 'em to work or get rid of 'em.    

[MP]

You can't teach a rock to fly without a slingshot.

lol, that's my favorite quote so far today.

[Mark]

I don't purge my dwg's. But here's why. When I start a new dwg I use a template that has all my layers and all the layers defined by my co-departments standard. I often hand off my dwg's to them for design work. When they get my dwg's all their layers are all ready setup for them. Make sense?

[Slim©]

Makes good sense, however once you have the majority of your work done, and are going to send it to the client, sub-consultants and primarys, you should purge.

[Mark]

Agreed, but most of our dwg's never leave our office.

[Slim©]

There we go another exception, just goes to show we all have different needs.

[MP]

I don't purge my dwg's. But here's why. When I start a new dwg I use a template that has all my layers and all the layers defined by my co-departments standard. I often hand off my dwg's to them for design work. When they get my dwg's all their layers are all ready setup for them. Make sense?

With your abilities in lisp you could quickly roll-your own layer maker, or insert a blank drawing that has nothing but the layers you want defined; burp => instant layers, but no purging? Eeek!

[Slim©]

With your abilities in lisp you could quickly roll-your own layer maker, or insert a blank drawing that has nothing but the layers you want defined; burp => instant layers, but no purging? Eeek!

Whoa, novel thought!!!!!    

[Mark]

With your abilities in lisp you could quickly roll-your own layer maker, or insert a blank drawing that has nothing but the layers you want defined; burp => instant layers, but no purging? Eeek!

Sad truth is I have one, that was hard to say I have a set of functions that read and write layer names stored in the registry. Maybe Monday I'll implement that and see how it goes. thanks.

[CADaver]

We, typically, don't purge until the drawings are ready for transfer to the customer.  Until that time there maybe custom enetities we wish to retrieve.

[Keith™]

Well, I purge my drawings EVERY time I save them ...

Before I am told that this is neither efficient use of my time, nor productive, let me explain ....

I have "housekeeping" routines that run independently of each other and independent of user interaction

This is how I have it setup ...

Reactor for purging drawing, I'll explain the "EndSave" thing in a minute....

Code: [Select]


Private Sub AcadDocument_EndSave(ByVal FileName As String)
 SendCommand "ENDIT" & vbCr
End Sub


This is the purging proggie .....

Code: [Select]


(defun c:ENDIT (/ NAME)
  (setq CMD (getvar "CMDECHO")
  (setvar "CMDECHO" 0)
  (setq NAME (getvar "DWGNAME"))
  (IF (/= (GETVAR "DWGPREFIX")(SUBSTR NAME 1 (STRLEN (GETVAR "DWGPREFIX"))))
      (SETQ NAME (STRCAT (GETVAR "DWGPREFIX")NAME))
  )
  (setvar "EXPERT" 4)
  (command ".WBLOCK" NAME "*")
  (setvar "EXPERT" 0)
  (setvar "CMDECHO" CMD)
  (princ)
)


This line is located in my Acaddoc.lsp

Code: [Select]


(command "-insert" "*mytemplate" "0,0" 1 0)


Now while it is not elegant, it is efficient, behind the scenes, and no user interaction required

Let me explain the EndSave thing above in case you have not figured it out...

If you use the wblock command it does not reset the dbmod variable and thus will prompt you to save the drawing once again when you close it. (effectively losing any purging value), plus you will have a bak in the event you need to "undo" your save.

So now whenever I "save" a drawing (regardless of how it was initiated) the reactor will call the endit routine after it has been initially saved,  wblock my entire drawing to the original drawing name, effectively purging it.

When I open a new drawing, the line in my acaddoc.lsp will automatically insert the default template (containing all of my layers, linetypes, textstyle, dimstyles, etc...) and since it is inserted as an exploded block, it does not get written to the drawing header.

I only audit drawings once or twice during their lifespan...but then again it is regularly only a few weeks long.... then it is archive city....

[MP]

Hi Keith - Do you check for excessive appid (Registered Applications) counts and purge them? If not, it's probably only a matter of time before you start, particularly if you use any add-ons or third party applications. Once the count grows beyond 32767 +/- AutoCAD will begin to chuck a wobbly; catching it before it grows to such cancerous proportions is advised.

I've also found some dictionary entries of third party applications can grow astronomically -- we've had munster files with nominal content approaching 100 MB - when put on the examination table they were found to have dictionary entries in excess of 5.5 million (I'm not kidding). When the cancerous dictionary entries were excised they were sprightly 1 MB dwgs.

Sadly these are true stories; carry a big stick, make noise.

[Keith™]

I have had the occasion to need to remove many unused appids from a drawing, and yes I know about the 32k mark for appids. I am not completely positive, but by wblocking the entire drawing, I think unused appids are purged. Dictionaries I think are purged as well

[M-dub]

I have a very old macro that I've used since R14 for purging...

Code: [Select]

^C^C_-Purge;a;;n;^C^C_-Purge;a;;n;^C^C_-Purge;a;;n;

Remember when you had to purge a few times to get everything out?  that's why I repeat it three times...  I KNOW it's ugly, but it works...

I also created a block with all layers and linetypes in it that I used to insert into a drawing.  Of course, for the linetypes, there's a little more work to load them, but I have that in a different macro.

[pmvliet]

Keith's method works pretty good and I am thinking of borrowing it.  

Purging is an interesting beast. Like with anything else, different companies will have their reason to purge or not to purge. For Keith, Cab, T-Bear, they work in smaller companies. They know Cadd, Most of their drawings stay in-house. Typically I would believe their drawings stay fairly clean and error free. I also don't believe they perpetuate any one drawing, as in most jobs are unique and they won't re-use files over and over again. Cab might be an exception with his houses.

I work in Retail. I can take one store(set of files) and use it on 20 to 50 locations. As in once store 1 is done, we take those files and create store 2. 2 might be a flip of 1. 2 might me a mirror of 1. After you get to the 20th store, it could be back to the original. Yes, we do keep track of what happens at each store and will take store 1 to create store 4 if it is identical or a closer start point.

In Civil, a site topo will be perpetuated for a very long time. Often between platforms and many different firms. let alone all the 3rd party applications Civil people will use with the different platforms. This is where we purge, audit and recover a lot.

I have to post a lot of drawings to client websites/ftp sites. Bandwidth is money. To help bandwidth, I purge drawings to reduce file size. For one particular client I can reduce files size by half. Instead of sending 100MB, I only send 50MB. Just think how that will effect your transfer time or your harddrive space. 1 of our file servers holds 322GB. This is not 100% drawings, but I bet if I purged all the autocad file's on the server, I would get a 25% reduction in size.. maybe 80GB...

Pieter