Converting an Xref with absolute path, to a relative path v14

Joe Dunfee

 I am on v14, and am dealing with a set of drawings from a client, who used absolute paths.

I have been manually updating the paths for them, but ran into a few problems.  The main one is that browsing to a new location for the Xref does not give me the option of using a relative path.  So, when I move the project to the company server, all the paths will be wrong again.  I can't even manually edit the text of the path, to try to convert it to being relative.

The 2nd issue comes up if an Xref has any child Xref's itself. The child xrefs all show up in the list of Xrefs.  Is there an easy way to discern which are the parent Xrefs?

-Joe

Roy Klein Gebbinck

If you cannot edit the saved path manually you are dealing with a nested Xref. To analyse the nesting tree switch to Tree View in the Drawing Explorer.

Joe Dunfee

 Thank you very much for that.  This made it a lot easier to fix things.

-Joe

Knut Hohenberg

I use xrefs a lot, and wrote some scripts to ease my work - there is also a command (XPATH) that does path conversion among them.
May not be of great help (all these scripts prompt you to select instances graphically), but  see for yourself...

xrefhandling.lspxrefdisplay.dcl

Joe Dunfee

 That LISP looks very interesting.  What does the XSOURCE command do?  I see that it "selects xref source file"... but I don't understand what that means.

Also, would you mind explaining a bit more about how the XPATH command works. I understand that it converts between absolute/relative/no xref paths. But, what, sort of logic does it follow?

-Joe

Knut Hohenberg

Hello Joe,

the XSOURCE command prompts you to select an externally referenced insert, and then pops up a file selection window with the source file pre-selected. You may then choose another file as source, and the xref will be updated accordingly. In contrast to selecting another source file via the path field in the xref explorer window (which always returns an absolute path), the command tries to determine if the existing path is absolute, relative or missing, and keeps this setting.

The XPATH command prompts you to select externally referenced inserts, and will then ask if their paths should be converted to absolute, relative or no path at all (the 'no path' option will only strip the path if the file can be found without one, and just falls back to a relative path otherwise).

In recent BricsCAD versions, both commands are not strictly needed anymore (since the context menu in the xref explorer has an option to convert paths), but I still use them quite often, since selecting the xrefs graphically is sometimes more convenient than going through a long list in the explorer...

As to the rest of the scripts, I wrote a short explanation at the bottom of a post entitled  BIM workflow questions, issues (including a very clumsy screen recording that tries to show their functionality).