Video Transcript
In this video, you’re going to learn about CAD extractions.
For your CAD documents—like DWG files, Inventor IDWS, and SolidWorks SLD DRW files—you need to set up the right plugins to pull data from these file types.
To get started, go to the System tab.
On the Administer panel, you need to set up your plugin.
You’ll see a list of CAD applications that are currently loaded. If, for example, you don’t see AutoCAD in this list, go to administer plugins and check that those plugins are turned on.
Here, you’ll find a list of plugins you can enable for your ADEPT environment.
In this case, AutoCAD is loaded, and it’s set to load on startup.
If it’s set to load on startup but still isn’t loading on your machine, you probably don’t have AutoCAD installed.
If you did have AutoCAD, it would show up as loaded—especially if “load on startup” is set to true.
Make sure the plugins are loaded in your CAD environments before moving on.
Leave the Administer plugins window and go back to configure plugins.
Under Configure plugins, you’ll see a list of your CAD applications. For this demo, let’s look at AutoCAD.
In AutoCAD, you’ll see some important areas. At the top left, you have extensions. These extensions get applied whenever a certain action happens for those file types.
You set up those actions here, where you have options like extract attributes, extract layouts, relationships, and thumbnails. You can update the document directly from Adept. You can also do a batch open and save. That means you open the file and save it with the latest or current version of CAD.
There are other options to fill out the data card with the active layout sheet. So, if you're saving your AutoCAD drawings on a specific layout, and you only want data pulled from that layout, this is where you set that up.
If you want to include block definitions for extractions—not just the block references, which is the data you see inside the drawing when you click on a block with attributes—this option will also check block definitions.
When you use the AutoCAD BATTMAN command, you'll see a list of definitions.
If you need to get information from there, you can turn this option on to include it.
At the bottom of this dialog, you’ll find all your Adept fields. These are extraction fields, defined based on your environment.
On the system tab, if you go into Database Field, you can choose which fields you want as extracted.
For example, for approval one, you see protected, extracted, indexed, and restricted. Make sure "extracted" is set to true if you need to pull data from your CAD documents into this field.
Now, go back to the Configure Plugins window and select AutoCAD again. This bottom left section shows which fields are marked as Adept extraction fields.
You can also see how many mappings you have for these fields. For example, title three has two mappings. If you look in the middle section, you’ll see which mappings are set up for that field. So, there are two attributes.
Both attributes have a title called "title panel three." That's the attribute name you’re looking for inside the drawing files. But the difference here is the blocks. You need to know which block these attributes should be extracted from.
Sometimes, you might have multiple block names with the same attribute. You have to make sure you map them correctly.
In this case, you have an AutoCAD electrical title block and an SS_DSize title block.
Both of them use the same attribute for title three, so you map them both to title three.
On the far right, you’ll see available fields you can choose from to map to your Adept fields. To get this list to show up, go up to the scan button, then browse for a file.
Remove the old one if needed, and add a new file.
You can grab a file here. This could come from your drawing templates, or maybe from a vendor.
If you always work with a certain vendor, they might have their own attributes that you need to map to your Adept attributes so everything lines up.
Go ahead and select your drawing, then press OK. The bottom right section will fill out with a number of items you can select or use for your mappings.
Here, you’ll see attributes, properties, and other things that might come from the file itself, like the file version or the origin.
If you don’t have any sheet sets in this drawing, you won’t see any here.
But if you did, you’d see sheet set properties.
If you want to manually create a mapping or add available data that might show up in a block, just right-click on this section and click Add. Now you can add your own properties or values that you want to extract from any document.
It doesn't matter if it's CAD, Word, or Excel. Since you're using the AutoCAD plugin, you have a special option here called sheet set property.
You also have attributes. These two—sheet set property and attributes—are specific to AutoCAD.
Property and other are for all documents, not just AutoCAD.
If you have a sheet set you usually use, like a sheet set template for all your projects,
you can map sheet set parameters. These could be document properties or custom properties from the sheet set.
Just enter the name you want to search for, so you can pull that value into Adept.
Here, you'll see a type, which tells you if it's an attribute, a property, or something else. You also have the attribute, which is the name of the attribute.
For example, you might have app underscore B underscore by—so, approved by.
You can also extract things like checked by or other checked by attributes. You will also notice the name of the block where theattribute is defined.
In the drawing you scanned, you have a block called title block.
Inside that title block, you'll find many attributes that can be assigned to Adept fields.
Now, lets map this to a field in Adept.
On the Adept side, scroll down to checked by. Select this property and map it to this attribute or Adept field.
Now, you have checked by with your custom field coming from AutoCAD as an attribute. You can also select the other attributes if you want to map them to the same field.
This way, if any of these attributes are filled out, the value will be pulled into the correct Adept field. Usually, in a drawing, you'll have several checked by attributes.
This might be part of a workflow, so you probably don't need every single one in here, since it will just keep overwriting the same value. In that case, you might want to create other fields in the depth to map those different stages, or just map one, instead of using the setup Autodesk provides in their template drawing.
If you make a mistake here, you can come in and remove any of them. You can select all or highlight any of these fields or tags, then just hit the delete key, or right-click and choose unmap.
Go back and add that one here, then click OK.
Now, whenever you find a drawing with that attribute, you can run an extraction on that document.
Right now, there aren’t any documents here to extract from. This is just an overview of how to set up your CAD plugins so you can extract the right data for your drawings and make your system searchable.
