set xrefs to relative path

[Anonymous]

My IT support have informed me that we are going to have to change our mapped drives in the near future along with an XP rollout, is there a way of setting the defaults in the xref insert to default to relative path, rather than full path as comes up at the moment, Can this also be set up as part of the network install process? or do I have to trek round my users and do this.
I understand that I can use the reference manager to manage the changeover of existing drawings (tens of thousands) but need to set up the system such that it will be independant of the drive mappings on the users workstations (our company has too many servers to assign each one with its own drive letter), thus the reason we want the paths independant of the drive mapping.
Any suggestions

[Anonymous]

I have to ask...

Why in the WORLD would they need to change mapped drives? There's nothing in XP
that would necessitate this. There are plenty of options at their disposal to
work around the issue, and there is simply no reason to perform such a
destructive IT maneuver.

Matt
mstachoni@comcast.net
mstachoni@bhhtait.com

On Wed, 25 May 2005 10:47:16 +0000, Grendel <> wrote:

>My IT support have informed me that we are going to have to change our mapped drives in the near future along with an XP rollout, is there a way of setting the defaults in the xref insert to default to relative path, rather than full path as comes up at the moment, Can this also be set up as part of the network install process? or do I have to trek round my users and do this.
>I understand that I can use the reference manager to manage the changeover of existing drawings (tens of thousands) but need to set up the system such that it will be independant of the drive mappings on the users workstations (our company has too many servers to assign each one with its own drive letter), thus the reason we want the paths independant of the drive mapping.
>Any suggestions

[Anonymous]

At the moment our drawing office drives are mapped to E & F, the new XP boxes will have the C drive invisible, so the machines drive will be D, the CD will get mapped to E, this is where our problems start, the bulk of our drawings are on our E drives, our higher security projects are on the F
The whole company is getting their workstations treated like this (2-3000 stations, so upsetting a few (10-12 CAD users)doesnt even come into their considerations, us having to remap Xrefs on 30-40000 files doesnt matter - thats 'our problem' not theirs, sum total - this is how its going to be - we dont came what probnlems that causes the users.
We are having to fight hard to get up-specced machines over the standard build for MS office users, some of the upgrades (better video cards) will have to be retrospective. The mere fact we dont just use the standard software is seen as a problem for them.
I have told my staff that from now on we will just use relative paths for Xref, and they have all agreed, but I would like the xref dialog to default to the relative path rather than full path, either that or I have to investigate connecting to network drives without mapping (I think that is an option in XP)

[Anonymous]

You might want to determine new Map drive letters (to be used from now on)
BEFORE the change by IT. Then make a change to a few projects to test. There
are many discussions about mass changes to drawings in the customization NG.
But if you have made the changes before the XP rollout, there should be less
problems.

wrote in message news:4855606@discussion.autodesk.com...
My IT support have informed me that we are going to have to change our
mapped drives in the near future along with an XP rollout, is there a way of
setting the defaults in the xref insert to default to relative path, rather
than full path as comes up at the moment, Can this also be set up as part of
the network install process? or do I have to trek round my users and do
this.
I understand that I can use the reference manager to manage the changeover
of existing drawings (tens of thousands) but need to set up the system such
that it will be independant of the drive mappings on the users workstations
(our company has too many servers to assign each one with its own drive
letter), thus the reason we want the paths independant of the drive mapping.
Any suggestions

[Anonymous]

Right click on my computer
go to manage
go to disk management
Re name E to Y
No you don't have to change anything.

Just a thought

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates, Inc.

[Anonymous]

This just sounds like a power move on the ITs part. Although I understand
that only 10-30 employees out of 2500 or so, doesnt mean re thinking an
office wide change, BUT maybe it should be rethought. why cant they just
assign the g: drive to the CD Rom. There must be other departments that are
being affected.

This just sounds like a half thought out idea with a quick solution.

But that is just an oppinion and an encurragement to talk with other
department heads to put the presure on IT.

I recommend making a VB script to do the work for you and letting it run
over a weekend or 2.


wrote in message news:4855747@discussion.autodesk.com...
At the moment our drawing office drives are mapped to E & F, the new XP
boxes will have the C drive invisible, so the machines drive will be D, the
CD will get mapped to E, this is where our problems start, the bulk of our
drawings are on our E drives, our higher security projects are on the F
The whole company is getting their workstations treated like this (2-3000
stations, so upsetting a few (10-12 CAD users)doesnt even come into their
considerations, us having to remap Xrefs on 30-40000 files doesnt matter -
thats 'our problem' not theirs, sum total - this is how its going to be - we
dont came what probnlems that causes the users.
We are having to fight hard to get up-specced machines over the standard
build for MS office users, some of the upgrades (better video cards) will
have to be retrospective. The mere fact we dont just use the standard
software is seen as a problem for them.
I have told my staff that from now on we will just use relative paths for
Xref, and they have all agreed, but I would like the xref dialog to default
to the relative path rather than full path, either that or I have to
investigate connecting to network drives without mapping (I think that is an
option in XP)

[Anonymous]

On Wed, 25 May 2005 13:24:35 +0000, Grendel <> wrote:

>At the moment our drawing office drives are mapped to E & F,

Okay, I can see how using E:\ is becoming a problem as people incorporate more
optical drives and card readers on their PCs.

>the new XP boxes will have the C drive invisible, so the machines drive will be D, the CD will get mapped to E,

Well, this is a bozo move, no question. There's no reason to make C:\ invisible
in the first place.

Also, there's no problem in reconfiguring the CD to make it a different drive
letter (Z:\). This can be taken care of with a simple script that happens when
the machine boots up, and only has to be done once to take effect.

Of course, they should never have started mapping drives at E:\, so close to the
local machine drive letters.

Regardless, your IT peeps can implement DFS on the server(s), which would
consolidate your remote resources to more appropriate drive letters as needed.

In the end, your IT people are making things way tougher than they need to be.

To answer your original post, you can use the Reference Manager to map the
projets to use Relative Paths, and the Xref command in 2004+ allows you to
select a Relative Path option.

Matt
mstachoni@comcast.net
mstachoni@bhhtait.com

[Anonymous]

Most of the users will be locked out of disk management for just that reason, they want it standard, not different for every user, only the lucky few users with admin rights will get to play with Disk Manager (& not even those if they get their way)

[Anonymous]

Standardisation, Standardisation, Standardisation.
The Xref path remapping will be an as and when, when we need the files we will re-map.

[Anonymous]

IT already have simple scripts that ensure any such changes revert to the way they want it when you log on - screensavers revert, just about any change you make to any settings reverts as you log on - even the office assistant gets changed back every couple of days, talk about tied down drum tight!
they lock the C drive out to stop users changing anything, a large proportion of users are in customer services on the phones, they are trying to tie them down, but catching everyone else in the process, apparently too much IT time is lost resetting up PC's that someone has 'fiddled' with and managed to get into a non working state - us poor users that need the advanced features get clobbered with these protocols they are putting in place - I had a CAD user the other day complaining because he wasnt given the ability to create a custom paper size for a long plot he needed to print - the option was greyed out!! talk about trying to work with one hand tied behind our backs.
What I am refering to is the default state of the path in the xref command which at the moment is full path, what I would like is to change that default state to relative.
At the moment I am looking into the 'my network' option of adding drives, using the full server path name, the only trouble is wether all applications can navigate to the 'my network' area, I seem to remember in my trawls through in the last couple of hours, I had an application that couldnt navigate through to the my network area

[Anonymous]

Well, the default for the Xref dialog box is held in the Registry, which is
apparently out of reach for mere users.

It's held under
HKCU\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\[ProductVer]\[ProductID]\Profiles\[ProfileName]\dialogs\XattachDialog

A setting of 0 (the default) is Full Path. 1 = Relative, and 2 = No path.

On my machine, the setting is persistent between sessions. Of course, I have
full admin rights to my PC. A simple .REG file and/or login script is all one
needs to make this the automated default.

If, of course, this doesn't violate some sacred decree from the IT Shamans.

Matt
mstachoni@comcast.net
mstachoni@bhhtait.com


On Wed, 25 May 2005 14:45:05 +0000, Grendel <> wrote:

>IT already have simple scripts that ensure any such changes revert to the way they want it when you log on - screensavers revert, just about any change you make to any settings reverts as you log on - even the office assistant gets changed back every couple of days, talk about tied down drum tight!
>they lock the C drive out to stop users changing anything, a large proportion of users are in customer services on the phones, they are trying to tie them down, but catching everyone else in the process, apparently too much IT time is lost resetting up PC's that someone has 'fiddled' with and managed to get into a non working state - us poor users that need the advanced features get clobbered with these protocols they are putting in place - I had a CAD user the other day complaining because he wasnt given the ability to create a custom paper size for a long plot he needed to print - the option was greyed out!! talk about trying to work with one hand tied behind our backs.
>What I am refering to is the default state of the path in the xref command which at the moment is full path, what I would like is to change that default state to relative.
>At the moment I am looking into the 'my network' option of adding drives, using the full server path name, the only trouble is wether all applications can navigate to the 'my network' area, I seem to remember in my trawls through in the last couple of hours, I had an application that couldnt navigate through to the my network area

[Anonymous]

I was looking to avoid mapping, either by using relative paths, or by using drives through the 'my network' in XP
even now we have the odd engineer who just cant get his drives mapped right, so I wanted a way of getting round this without drive mappings, mapping via the full server path achieves this, as as long as the server doesnt change (that too may happen) you would be fine. I have converted some files over to this using reference manager, but the drawback there is that I have a couple of engineers who still use LT2000, so we save back to 2000 at the moment, and reference manager saves as 2004

[Anonymous]

I'm not an IT guy, not even close and I never stayed in a Best Western
either but here goes. What's so hard about having your cad guys in a
different group on the server? Different rights and restrictions than the
customer service....

Matt

[Anonymous]

I can ask - they like setting registry defaults - they know how to do that, and it means the user doesnt have control of it.

[Anonymous]

We are not only in a different group, we are in a different division, yet they still want to apply these rules globally, we already have different permissions - just to access our drawings etc, customer branch cant access these, but we still have to fight to get our user rights sorted out - IT just dont understand the complexity of CAD they think its a bit of software just like word - load and forget , no need to tweak anything, Oh how I fight, daily it seems! it took us a while to get our permissions changed to recieve dwg file in e-mails (subversive file type we dont understand and cant open to check content - so lets block it) Dont worry, I am slowly getting our IT support trained, daily calls logged to the service desk to change settings, then change them back when I have finished - these show up on their call logs, then they start asking questions - why does this user need so much support, when they ask i tell them, its because you wont give me the permissions to do my job - slowly oh so slowly. then when they relent and give me the permissions I get them to apply them to the drawing office group as a whole. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Along with everything else in this thread, setting drivemappings so low is
going to pose a problem for autodetecting digital cameras and anything with
a card reader. The drive letters for these "removable drives" will want to
default to the next available local drive letter - which would be F:, (hard
drive D:, CD E:) I guess? Since F: is taken by the network, they won't be
recognized properly. Without access to the drive letter options, you're
stuck.

[Anonymous]

We set our server driver letters real high, like Y: and Z:

Matt

"pkirill" wrote in message
news:4856232@discussion.autodesk.com...
Along with everything else in this thread, setting drivemappings so low is
going to pose a problem for autodetecting digital cameras and anything with
a card reader. The drive letters for these "removable drives" will want to
default to the next available local drive letter - which would be F:, (hard
drive D:, CD E:) I guess? Since F: is taken by the network, they won't be
recognized properly. Without access to the drive letter options, you're
stuck.

[Anonymous]

~nods~ my server got switched out a couple of months back and I got 2 days
notice. wasn't even a question of permission. I am on a server that services
about 25 differenct departments, and we are just blocked from certain areas
by permissions.
so, another hassle to ensure that noone else had write-access to my files,
and an additional hassle to make sure that like, nursing, contracted
employees etc couldn't see them. (i mention I work in engineering for a
hospital?)

pain with this is that, for whatever reason, before my time, the cad ops
computer was mapped from a different location on the server than most of the
users who are viewing the files. say, r drive on cad ops computer starts 4
folders down from shared directory marked s on everyone's pc.

so, I have always had problems with various users being unable to see the
x-refs of files. I access the files the same way the others do now, so the
newer files aren't an issue with this, but, would just be easier to reset
all of the thousands of existing files to relative at once.

~looks around~ I'm sorry, wot was the question? ~goes for another cup of
coffee~

wrote in message news:4856060@discussion.autodesk.com...
We are not only in a different group, we are in a different division, yet
they still want to apply these rules globally, we already have different
permissions - just to access our drawings etc, customer branch cant access
these, but we still have to fight to get our user rights sorted out - IT
just dont understand the complexity of CAD they think its a bit of software
just like word - load and forget , no need to tweak anything, Oh how I
fight, daily it seems! it took us a while to get our permissions changed to
recieve dwg file in e-mails (subversive file type we dont understand and
cant open to check content - so lets block it) Dont worry, I am slowly
getting our IT support trained, daily calls logged to the service desk to
change settings, then change them back when I have finished - these show up
on their call logs, then they start asking questions - why does this user
need so much support, when they ask i tell them, its because you wont give
me the permissions to do my job - slowly oh so slowly. then when they relent
and give me the permissions I get them to apply them to the drawing office
group as a whole. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Our It use the high letters for common drives- W=work, U=user drive etc so we may have to work in the middle somewhere.
of course that is always assuming we will be able to use removable drives, all A drives are locked out unless you get a form signed and have a very good reason for needing one, smae with CD drives etc.

[Anonymous]

We use a utility called XRP (Xref Relative Paths). I'm not sure about
AutoCAD 2005/2006, but with 2004 that we use, one can only apply a relative
path when first attaching the XREF. If the XREF already have full paths
incuding drive letter, AutoCAD has no automatic way to convert the full path
to a relative one. Also, the Image command does not have a provision for
relative paths.

So, we still use this XRP utility (works for IMAGE paths too), and our users
can just run XRP after attaching XREFs or IMAGEs, to quickly convert them to
use relative paths. Then one can copy/move a CAD folder tree to any drive
or other folder location, and all XREFs are found.

--

Mark McDonough
Sasaki Associates
http://www.sasaki.com

wrote in message news:4856991@discussion.autodesk.com...
Our It use the high letters for common drives- W=work, U=user drive etc so
we may have to work in the middle somewhere.
of course that is always assuming we will be able to use removable drives,
all A drives are locked out unless you get a form signed and have a very
good reason for needing one, smae with CD drives etc.