AutoCAD Time Command

[Anonymous]

AutoCAD Time Command is no longer displaying the "Drawing Creation" time in milliseconds, just seconds.  How can I activate the milliseconds display?

[rkmcswain]

Is this in 2017?

[rkmcswain]

My 2017 does this also.

It's almost certainly related to the DATE and CDATE sysvar issue in 2017 also. 

[Darin.Green]

Here's the reason you're not seeing milliseconds...

When a drawing is created, it uses the system time stamp which doesn't has milliseconds as an option.

Granted, this couldn't be set programmatically by Autodesk developers but that's not the case.

To test this further, you can use the following syntax within CMD which will tell you the actual time the file was created.

Open a new command prompt and type the following:

wmic datafile where name="C:\\temp\\drawing.dwg" get creationdate | findstr /brc:[0-9]

Change the name value to the correct path of the file. Note the double-slashes as they are required.

The output will show something like this:

20161005132100.000000-240

[Year] [Month] [Day] [Hour] [Min] [Sec].[Milliseconds]...

That would indeed indicate the file was created using a timestamp depth of seconds (ss)

There's really nothing that you can do, unless you intervene the creation of the file to tag on milliseconds programmatically which isn't worth it in my opinion.

Hope that helps.

[rkmcswain]

@Darin.Green - it works fine in AutoCAD versions prior to 2017.

[Darin.Green]

That is correct. Again, that's because it was programmed to due so. AutoCAD 2017 save, does not do this. During the save, AutoCAD determine what the creation time should include (Y-m-d HH-mm-ss.fff) in the case of 2017, it's depth is second "ss"

Create a file from AutoCAD 2016 & one from 2017. Then run the command line tool from my previous post to see the difference.

Maybe this should be reported as a bug, which Autodesk can push out an update...

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone.  Yes it is the 2017 version.  I am a Basic AutoCAD instructor and I always checked the "Created" time on student submissions to make sure they were not "sharing" drawings.

[Darin.Green]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks everyone.  Yes it is the 2017 version.  I am a Basic AutoCAD instructor and I always checked the "Created" time on student submissions to make sure they were not "sharing" drawings.

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You're welcome! And, I understand your struggle but again this is not working with the 2017 release of AutoCAD. It's always been difficult trying to determine where or not someone is copying other peoples work in the educational community.

I've seen schools with custom scripts to determine if the drawing is in fact authentic. In my opinion, there should be a created by field, and object data that contains the path referencing the association of a file when something is copied from another file.

Either way, you should log Product Feedback to make Autodesk aware of the issue so they can fix it for future updates and releases.

[Kent1Cooper]

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@Anonymous wrote:

....  I am a Basic AutoCAD instructor and I always checked the "Created" time on student submissions to make sure they were not "sharing" drawings.

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[I confess to having been curious as to why milliseconds could possibly matter for something like this.  I would think an accuracy to the nearest second would be more than enough for the purpose -- it would be a pretty astonishing coincidence if two student created their drawings independently within the same second, so that you would need to get down to the fractions-of-a-second level to be able to tell whether they were sharing!]

[Darin.Green]

I agree. A millisecond is more then sufficient. That being said, determining when the file was created, doesn't necessarily mean anything as users can use copy & paste at any stage of their drawing.

an alternative method, is to use Autodesk Vault for managing and maintaining student drawings. There you can track versions, file properties, and much more.