topic Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing in AutoCAD Forum

Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

SR_1 — Fri, 27 May 2022 12:01:57 GMT

Hello,

I believe that two of my coworkers are using cyber-harassment to frustrate me at work. Is there a way that I can prove to my company that somebody was in an AutoCAD drawing at a certain time, and then performed task-specific changes to that document? Or could I set up/customize my drawing so that it could be tracked and these individuals caught? I am using Autocad 2022.

We work with Architects and Engineers in-house and use many XREF's in how we set up our drawings so that we can efficiently develop plan sets. For instance, I created an XREF plan that was all set up and working well. Somebody tells me a week later that several items are mysteriously deleted from it, yet I wasn't in the file. These items, then were deleted from everyone's drawings. Numerous, other similar unexplained events have occurred and it is not a coincidence.

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

imadHabash — Fri, 27 May 2022 12:11:05 GMT

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Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

rkmcswain — Fri, 27 May 2022 12:19:10 GMT

Nothing built in. AutoCAD does not record each transaction to the drawing database.

Perhaps keep a copy of the DWG on your local PC or flash drive, and a binary comparison can be made to the newer version at a later time.

If you save to Onedrive or possibly other cloud locations, then versioning is/may be built in.

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

Valentin_CAD — Fri, 27 May 2022 13:20:17 GMT

@SR_1 ,

Here are some suggestions you may want to look into ...

Type 'DWGPROPS' at the command line, chose the 'statistics' tab, and look under 'last saved by'.

VAULT SOFTWARE (Link)

Using Work Area or Folder Audit Trail (Link)

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

dany_rochefort — Fri, 27 May 2022 14:35:37 GMT

Use the DWGPROPS command to view who last modified and saved, as mentionned @Valentin_CAD

Keep backup copies of all your revised xrefs on your local C: drive just in case.

Keep in mind that it might not by sabotage either, simply co-worker incompetence. The bigger the office, the higher the chances of this type of thing happening. Most design office workers have had the same thing happen to them at one time or another.

Extenal factors can also be at work here. Like some sort of custom ''in-house'' Lisp command or VBA program causing these problems. I've seen this happen as well.

Carefull with those ''Hackusations''

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

SR_1 — Fri, 27 May 2022 15:51:34 GMT

Thank you everyone for the suggestions. Would I be able to see what commands were used and by whom, in your solutions?

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

Valentin_CAD — Fri, 27 May 2022 17:25:56 GMT

@SR_1 ,

I don't believe there exist any software that (records the command) does what you want.

I suggest you speak with your supervisor and mention your suspicion.

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

TheCADnoob — Fri, 27 May 2022 18:38:57 GMT

A few thoughts:

Hanlon's Razor "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

We have issues like this occasionally and all are attributed to user error. It doesn't mean that the issues aren't an issue, but id be carful with coming at something like this with a punitive approach. (I have spent several years in QC roles and honest mistakes can be misinterpreted)

AutoCAD should notify you when an xref changes, granted it wont show you who changed it.

Check with your IT group and see if they have any suggestions. Our data is backed up on a timed interval and we can go back and get our data. Short of that windows has some of that functionality built in. You can at least prove that the drawing elements were there initially. There are also file properties that are avable in the windows file explorer that can tell you a limited amount of some of the information that you are looking for. JTB has some plugins as well that show drawing specific items in the explorer window as well. If you are using hosted storage often there are ways to receive alerts when files have changed and some of these types of services have audit trails. if you are using a simple file storage and are comfortable scripting a quick google search shows a couple thing that you could to to get notified of a file change.

If it is harassment, id do two things: The first is redo your resume and start casually looking and second speak to your manager and possibly HR. If the culture is overly hostile to you it may not be worth putting in the time there. This is never an easy thing to do but sometimes its for the best.

Absolutely the most important thing is if engineering is involved and drawing content is intentionally deleted without a design basis, I would consider that a Stop Work situation and I would make it known to the engineers (especially if they are stamping). I'm all for having fun around the office, but something like what you are describing invites way too much risk.

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

dherbstr — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 17:54:48 GMT

In 2007 I had a similar issue with a group of users. We didn't suspect the actions were malicious, just training issues, but we had significant issues that needed to be addressed. I worked with the head of our IT department to extract the kind of information you're looking for.

I don't remember all the details, but we basically wrote every AutoCAD command out to an SQL database. That allowed us to track which commands were executed by each user, when each command started, and when each completed. We told the drafters about it beforehand, and tracked two "power" users on other teams at the same time (as a baseline).

That provided a lot of useful data. We learned that one user was executing the UNDO command about 30% of the time (obviously an issue). The drafters were executing 1800 commands in a day of AutoCAD use (the power users were executing 2200 to 2300). Most were using around 20 different commands each day (the power users were using 30-35).

So I know there are ways to get what you're looking for. But as a CAD Manager, it's not something I would ever implement lightly or without transparency.

Re: Tracking users and their activities in a drawing

RobDraw — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:37:09 GMT

Sure there are ways to do it but it takes foresight and preparedness. There is no way to do it unless something is implemented ahead of time.