Attributes

[Dryseals]

Hi all,
I've been tossed into a well fire with a water hose to put it out. Seems I've been placed in the I/E design group to clean things ups. The guy before me kept multiple copies of drawing in tons of locations and I have to straighten it out.
I've use ACad since the early 90's and Access since then too. But never the two together.
I've looked at Mr. Carpenters code and I might be able to make it work for me later. But for now all I need is something to look at each drawing and extract ALL the Block names. Title blocks change from discipline to discipline and I have a ton of those.
All I want to do for now is grab the drawing and read all the blocks, not the attributes, just the block names. Once I establish each block then I'll get the rest of the data, but I'm having a tough time gtting that first kick.

Any help?

 

[CarlAK]

I believe there are methods to do this without opening the drawing....

But I know only lisp, and using a few lines of lisp code you can get all the block names from a drawing. Do you want only those that are used (inserted) in the drawing? Then, do you want that written to a file? I assume you can find a batch processing method that handles selecting, opening, & closing the drawings.

 

[Dryseals]

If I could find a method to do it without opening the file, that would be great. I started lisp many years ago but never stuck with it, most of the things I did were for proprietary machines. I know VB well enough to get most things, but I do not know the Acad libray well enough to get there without a long haul.

Just to give you an idea of what I'm up against, I was able to narrow the numbers to just a tad over 11,000 documents and files that have been duplicated. Total count of duplicates is approx 34,000. So there are about 23,000 files I need to examine and blow away. That's why I'm looking at attributes and their counts.

Once I get this info into an access db I can let it do the work for me. So what I need is to some how get the data from the drawings into a file.

Thanks
Mike