From the course: AutoCAD Map 3D 2022 Essential Training

Attaching source drawings - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Map 3D 2022 Essential Training

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Attaching source drawings

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- [Instructor] Source drawings are those DWGs that contain all your information. Attaching source drawings to another often blank drawing enables you to combine all that data and query information from multiple data sources. The nice thing about that is that it does not lock the drawing. So potentially, you could have thousands of people connected to the same source DWG. Let's learn how to attach source drawings to our current project. I've opened up the guelph.dwg. Next, I'm going to go to the Map Explorer, pick on drawings, right click, and click Attach. Now currently, it only attaches to the C drive, that's my only alias. So I'm going to create a brand new alias at the top, clicking the button called create edit aliases. The only one right now is the C drive but this one I want to call exercise files with an underscore, exercise files, like that. And I'm going to browse to my desktop. So I'll browse, to see Gordon Luckett, that's my username. Desktop, and choose exercise files and click okay. So you can see that my actual path is C/Users/GordonLuckett/Desktop/exercise_files. Now obviously it's not going to be your name, it's going to be whatever you're logged into your desktop with, where you extracted your exercise files. Click add. The nice thing about using an alias to point to all your drawings is that if you were to give this project, so source drawings plus the DWG that has everything attached, it's going to point to an alias called exercise files. They may be located somewhere else. So you can always go in and modify the actual path to make sure that your source drawings don't break when you open them up. And that's a very handy thing. Whereas if you linked it directly to the C drive, that doesn't change, you'd have to manually change what your C is. So by adding a drive alias called exercise files, you could put that folder of exercise files anywhere you wish, and just change the alias to them. So this is a very powerful tool, the idea of an alias, or drive alias. Now let's switch to the drive alias. Exercise files and you can see the various chapters. Now we're on chapter three, so go to chapter three, 03_01, and we're going to attach three drawings. The buildings, I'll click add. The hydrology, add and the streets, add. Now guelph is currently open, so it's not even selectable. And you'll see once you've attached the drawings down below, they're no longer selectable. So you can see that now I've got drawings, exercise files slash CH_03 Buildings, exercise files again, Hydrology and exercise files Streets. I've attached three different DWGs. I'll click okay. Now they show up in my task pane. Now I'll make my task pane a little bit bigger so you can read it. There we are. So you can see exercise files, Buildings, Hydrology and Streets. Now we could quickly view these all by right clicking on drawings and do a quick view. And it'll zoom to the extents of the selected drawings. All three are highlighted, I'll click okay. And there you have it, there's what the three different drawings will preview, we've got Hydrology, we have Buildings and we have Streets. As I zoom in you can see. Now all this data is coming from three completely different drawings. Now this is very similar to an external reference or ExRef, that's often used inside of autoCAD. The difference is that we now have the ability to connect multiple drawings to one file and not lock those files. So if anyone else uses autoCAD Map, they too can attach the Buildings, Hydrology and Streets without it being locked out. So that means you can have thousands of users connecting to this. Now a quick view is just a preview of what's inside the drawing. So I could simply regen our E at the command line and click enter and everything disappears. Now I can obviously right click on each individual object. So say I just want to preview the buildings, I could right click and go quick view of just the buildings, and they show up. Well let's zoom in a little bit more. And I'll right click and look at the streets. Right click, quick view and the streets show up. Now I can also right click on hydrology and go zoom extents. It'll zoom to the extents of the drawing, even though it's not even quick viewed yet. No I'll right click and go quick view. And we have it. So now I've got an attachment in this drawing, this guelph.dwg, just three of the source drawings. Now normally source drawings are drawings that have the data inside. Somebody's put a lot of work in, they may have an object data attached to it, it may have linked template data. It's definitely been cleaned up, this is a source drawing and normally what you can see is in this guelph drawing, so this is the project drawing, has attachments to all these source drawings. I normally don't draw inside of the project drawing unless I'm going to be saving back to the original. We'll get into saving back in another lesson. But the idea is this, that your data's stored in individual drawings and then you've got this one global drawing that points to all those source drawings. So sometimes I'll refer to it as a project drawing or main drawing and that links to all these source drawings and that's what these are, source, there's a source of our data. So attaching source drawings to your map does not mean the data's available til you actually query it in, now we haven't gotten to query yet, but remember that, it's not actually in the drawing. I can't actually pick on anything, per se. If I highlight, it's not available, it's just there, it's sort of a quick view and if I regen, it always disappears just like that. So using that quick view, you can quickly see what kind of data's available in the attached source drawings, so later on when we use the query library, we can know what to pull in and where we can pull it in from.

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