How to protect drawing?

[ProfWolfMan]

HI,

I have to deliver one big lisp program to customer.

In there i am using some symbol blocks which are kept as separate drawings.

Every block is in individual drawing.

I insert and explode them in new drawing and do some modifications.

All tasks are done by lisp only. No user interaction in between.

To deliver so, apart from my compiled lisp files, i have to give those drawing blocks.

But my company insists me to protect the drawing to view/modify from others than my lisp program.

Anyone of here suggest me a good way of drawing protect option to solve this issue.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

G

[Anonymous]

What I would do is to create only one dwg containing all the different blocks in it. Then I'd save this dwg with a password. Then I open it (by ObjectDBX, which means without really opening the dwg) from your Lisp routine (which is a .fas or .Vlx)  passing the password you only know. Then I'd import all the required blocks and Insert them & modify them as needed in the host dwg. Once the lisp has finished (here is the bloody part) save the file and close the Acad session (politely but inmediately, the user may open it later) just for avoiding anyone to open your library dwg (the one with all your blocks) in which case no password will be asked because you're still in the same acad session. For garantee this it would be better to set the SDI variable to 1 (acad work on only one dwg at a time) before proceed with your main lisp routine.

Looking forward your feed back...

Justo Aguiar.

[ProfWolfMan]

Hi,

Thank you very much for sharing your logic!

As per my situation, putting all blocks and make a single dwg is possible.

But to secure that main library drawing we need to set SDI to on.

this is not possible for my current situation.

Really your reply gives some hope for me on in this issue.

I am searching some more possibility to solve this.

I will share once i got any improvement.

Thanks & Regards,

G

[martti.halminen]

While you can do various tricks to protect your block library on disk, there isn't much you can do to prevent the user

from copying the blocks from the finished drawing.

One way to discourage using your library without your program would be to break your blocks to smaller parts, tag them in some non-obvious ways, transform some of the parts in some way, pile them all together, possibly adding unrelated dummy data, and add to your program parts to re-build the blocks at runtime from the parts as needed.

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