Topic Title

O.K. I know what your trying to accomplish but your talking about two different methods, both which we currently do not have and probably would be useful. The directly above posts would be a replacement tool that would search for a specific string of text in xref paths to be replaced with another string of text, which in turn would cause the xrefs to point to another location when opened. This one should be easy to do, but either the app would have to to have control options to rename files, folders, xref paths, etc. If the tool just replaced in xref paths, and the path contained the string of text to be replaced twice, it would also have to rename the sub-folders also, or it would be creating a bunch of orphans. You could expand on other types of pathing issues by using this type of tool, but I think you get the point.

The second method which would be relative pathing, would be a relational path relative to the files current location that would by dynamic and probably the best way to do it but probably more complex to program in because Datacad would have to handle the relationships internally in the program. This would probably work really well for files that live in the current folder or sub-folders. Xrefing to files in a higher level folder, would have to be manually repathed using the repath tool we have now or by using a tool like the one mentioned above just replacing a text string. (Which is really what the repath tool does now manually anyway). How high is this on the Datacad's list? I don't know. I'd guess that it's on it somewhere, but probably a ways down behind the currently promised smart stuff. But who knows. Dave's team has busted out some slick stuff before off the top of his head. So best wishes for your wish, and I hope for your sake it finds it's way to the top of the list.

Neil,
Yes I knew about repathing and redefining in groups. But I didn't know
about resizing the dialog box. Thanks for the tip!

Josh,
Yes, I've kind of been at it from two different angles. As to duplicated
text in the same string, the entire string up to the desired point could be
replaced instead of just one folder.

One thing to note with mapping a share on your own machine:-

1. On Win XP won't work if there's nothing plugged into the network card

2. Can't map to a share on your own computer with win98 or lower

OK thats two things.

Some useful cmd commands

net use s: \\computername\sharename
net use s: \\server\apps
net use s: /delete

for dos printing
net use lpt2 \\server\laser

Okay, it doesn't take all day to redefine 30 xrefs, but there are maybe 30 xrefs in EACH FILE. Dozens of files with xrefs in them, hundreds of xrefs, each project.

This takes way too much time when other programs handle it automatically. I could see if there were no other programs out there that could do the dynamic XREFing, but every other program I have used with this type of feature has dynamic referencing.

And NO, you can't tell them apart using the ref mgr because the path names are too long to display in that tiny window. Even so, you have to do this in each file, each xref ONE BY ONE, each file ONE BY ONE.

I believe the problem Steve is referring to is the fact that DataCAD's Reference Manager selects the shortest path name then cuts every other path name off at that point. Even if you had files down one folder from the root, put a file in the root directory and you can't see any of the other file names after that. This is a big problem since the program should take the longest file path and use that as reference so all of the others can be seen. You can stretch the window in some cases to see everything, but it's another extra step that's not necessary with dynamic referencing.

And with this many to do, it's not even humanly possible to get it right the first time. Errors are always discovered later. This is why it's important for this to be automated.

Personally, the only reason I believe it's one of the most needed changes. When you're talking about a typical project with 60-70 sheets, 5-10 XREFs per sheet, you are going to mess up when you're trying to re-reference all of those files.