How to Disable AutoCAD Drawing Property Extraction

One of the features of the Formtek EDM Module is the ability to extract AutoCAD block attributes when a drawing or drawing version is uploaded to the Alfresco repository. The extracted attribute values are stored as metadata (or properties) on the repository drawing per a configurable mapping. The following illustration shows several AutoCAD attributes in a drawing’s title block and how they could be stored as properties in the Alfresco repository:

In addition to AutoCAD block attributes, the EDM Module extracts the Title, Subject, and Author drawing properties (shown below) and stores them in the standard Alfresco Title (cm:title), Description (cm:description), and Author (cm:author) properties:

If you prefer not to have the AutoCAD drawing properties automatically extracted from DWG and DXF files, you can disable their extraction by following these steps:

1.     Edit the module-context.xml file in the tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/module/
org.formtek.edm.repo directory.

2.     Comment out the following lines for both the EDM_DWGExtractor and EDM_DXFExtractor beans:

<!--

                <prop key="prop_subject">cm:description</prop>

                <prop key="prop_title">cm:title</prop>

                <prop key="prop_author">cm:author</prop>    

-->

3.       Save the changes.

4.       Restart Alfresco.

These properties will no longer be extracted from DWG and DXF files.

NOTE:  If you ever redeploy the alfresco.war file, this change will be undone and will need to reapplied.