Dropbox and xrefs

Paul Moon

 I am posting this to see if anyone is doing something similar to this and have a workaround.

I have recently hired a draftsman that is working on my projects remotely.  To avoid the issue with "versions" of drawings I have set up a dropbox account and the files live there.  It has worked great in that we can both access the files, but when it comes time to print the sheet files, we are running into issues because of xref paths.  If printed from his computer, he must redirect the paths to his dropbox and visa versa for mine.

Does anyone have a simple solution for this?

Kindest,
Paul

Jason Bourhill

Hi Paul,

Ideally you would both work with the same relative folder structure for this project, then use the "Relative Path" option when attaching dependencies instead of the default "Full Path" , which saves the absolute position of the dependency. e.g. you might have a project folder for your drawings, then in this folder have a number sub folders called "Xrefs", "Images" etc for storing related dependencies.

You can also define a project name using the _SETTINGS dialogue:

• PROJECTNAME is a name you give your project, this name is saved in your drawing file.
• ProjectSearchPaths allows you to save a list of search folders for your given project. This information is specific to the folder structure on your own machine, so each of you would need to set this for yourself on your respective machines.
  

Workarounds for existing drawings:

• Place all the dependencies in the same folder as the drawing you want to work on. BricsCAD looks in the folder of the current drawing first when looking for files.
  
• Use _ETRANSMIT when packaging files. You can use options within eTransmit to update paths of dependencies.
  

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

Paul Moon

Jason,

Thank you very much.  This is helpful and we will incorporate.

Paul