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.

How to Configure the EDM Module to Ignore Uninitialized Drawing Views in the PDF Preview Rendition for Alfresco Share

One of the features of the Formtek Engineering Data Management Module (a.k.a EDM Module) is the ability to preview AutoCAD drawings in Alfresco Share. In previous EDM Module releases, you could only preview the drawing space (model or paper) that was active when the drawing was last saved. Starting with release 3.0, a multi-page PDF rendition is created that includes the model space and all available layout views. So, when you display a drawing in the Alfresco Share Document Details window, each available drawing view can be previewed as a separate page in the preview pane. For example, the drawing below is displayed as a 3-page PDF preview:

When we switch the Side Bar view to display bookmarks instead of thumbnails, you see the model space as the first page followed by two paper space layout views, Layout1 and Layout2, as the next two pages in the PDF preview:

When this drawing was first created as a new drawing in AutoCAD, the empty model space view and the two empty paper space views were created by default. However, the designer who created the drawing content only ever worked in the model space view. The layout views were never accessed, and thus, remained uninitialized in the saved drawing as you can see by the two empty thumbnails for Layout1 and Layout2 within AutoCAD:

By default, when the EDM Module creates the PDF rendition of a drawing, it automatically attempts to initialize any uninitialized layouts in the drawing and include them in the resulting PDF rendition. In the vast majority of cases, these auto-initialized layout views looks the same as if you had accessed (or initialized) the layout in AutoCAD.

I’ve you prefer not to include uninitialized layout views in the PDF rendition created by the EDM Module, your Alfresco administrator can modify the script that converts CAD drawings to PDF so that uninitialized layout views are ignored as follows:

1.      Open ALF_HOME/formtek/edm_module/bin/edm-cadtopdf.sh (on Linux) or ALF_HOME\formtek\edm_module\bin\edm-cadtopdf.bat (on Windows) for editing:

a.       Add the -nouninit parameter to the end of the following line:

               For Linux:

"${dwg_exename}" -i="${sourcename}" -o="${targetname}" -f=pdf -basic -axpath="${edmBinDir}/ax2011" -lpath="${edmBinDir}"

           For Windows: 

%dwg_exename% -i=%sourcename% -o=%targetname% -f=pdf -basic
-axpath="%edmBinDir%ax2011.exe"

For example:

"${dwg_exename}" -i="${sourcename}" -o="${targetname}" -f=pdf -basic -axpath="${edmBinDir}/ax2011" -lpath="${edmBinDir}" –nouninit

b.      Save and close the file.

Uninitialized layout views will no longer be included in any newly generated PDF renditions. For example, when this same drawing is uploaded a second time and previewed, you can see that only the model space view is available in the PDF preview:

 
Please note that any PDF rendition previously generated is stored in Alfresco along with its associated drawing and is not affected by this change unless a new version of the drawing is uploaded. Also note that the original drawing is unaffected by this change.

Rendering AutoCAD drawings in Alfresco

One question we are often asked is how to render AutoCAD drawings in Alfresco so that they show up as thumbnails and in the preview window.  

The easy answer is to license Formtek’s Engineering Data Management Module for Alfresco (the EDM Module).    When discussing rendering a drawing in Alfresco, several questions arise.  Among them: 

• Do you want to view just the base drawing or the complete drawing with its external references?
• Can you see all views of the drawing?
• Is there adequate capability to zoom and pan the drawing rendition?

With EDM Module release 3.0 (designed for Alfresco 5.1 and above), you can indeed view just the base drawing or the base drawing with its XRefs. 

Rendition of a Base Drawing with XRefs

By default, the EDM Module will render the model space and all layout views in a multi-page PDF. All renditions are in vector format, allowing the scroll and zoom features of the Alfresco viewer to be exercised with complete fidelity. Note that the Alfresco viewer has a zoom limitation of 400%.  If you download the multi-page PDF rendition, you will be able to take advantage of the zoom, scroll and pan features of your reader.  (For instance, the Adobe Reader allows zooming up to 6400%.)

The EDM Module also comes with a built in content model, which includes both an Engineering Drawing and Engineering Document content type.  And, of course includes view, edit and search forms.  

 

Default Edit Form:  Engineering Drawing Content Type

It is a fairly easy exercise to map the block attributes from a drawing into the content properties in the Engineering Drawing type.  You can also create your own custom content model and map the block attributes to the properties in that model.

Here’s a video with more information about the basic functionality of the EDM Module:

Formtek EDM Module for Alfresco

 

And here’s one which provides more information about managing XRefs in the EDM Module:

 

Managing Drawings with External References

If you are interested in direct synchronization with AutoCAD, Formtek also offers a plug-in to AutoCAD which integrates AutoCAD and Alfresco, but that will be the subject of another blog post.

One final note:  the EDM Module for Alfresco only works with Alfresco Enterprise One (i.e. not with the Community version of Alfresco).