Any way to create a list of materials without blocks or 3D?

[Anonymous]

I was wondering if it is possible to make a list of the materials not using blocks or 3D (BIM). Is it possible to generate liust of materials from a project in 2D without prepared blocks or 3D bim?

[dgorsman]

Its complicated, but yes.  In short you would attach information to objects using XDATA or extension dictionaries/xrecords and then report on that data.  Its also somewhat possible to track entity handles in an external database which also contains the additional data, but it's prone to problems such as COPY, COPYPASTE, WBLOCK, and other standard operations.  Various third-party solutions have used a combination of the two methods.

Both of those also have problems with the basic entities i.e. you don't want to have to guess which 'line' object that shows a wall has the data associated with it, nor do you want to have the data duplicated across all of them.  You want at least some blocks, but custom ObjectARX objects are the best (if most complicated) solution.

[Anonymous]

Very good answer, thank you.

But if the drawing is from another party and you can´t associate data with it or create objects. Could we have a solution or app that create list of materials? Something like this exists?

[dgorsman]

No, if you have a third-party drawing made of basic entities you can't reliably extract such information automatically.