@jggerth wrote:
....
Option B, XOpen the Xref, Use LAYISO to isolate the layer you want, then WBLOCK out everything on the layer. Close the Open XREF, and Insert the fresh Wblock.
.....
A variant on that: Open the Xref in REFEDIT, isolate the Layer, Copy everything on it, Remove the copies from the working set, and close the Refediting without saving changes, and the copies will be in your current drawing. It's an approach that avoids the creation of an additional external drawing file. However, it leaves you with all that content as separate objects in the current drawing, not as one Block, if that matters.
In a quick test, I had trouble doing this by just copying in place so that the extracted things would already be in the same place in the current drawing. If I ask it to remove from the working set the Previous selection [so I don't need to pick all the copies that are overlaid on the originals, expecting that the originals will then go into the current drawing], I end up with nothing transferred. But if I Copy things to a different place by some round-figures distance, I can then Remove them from the working set and it works, and then Move them back the same distance in the opposite direction. Or if I Copy them in place, and in the remove-from-the-working-set operation I window the whole area again [getting both the previous selection and the copies of it] and then use the Remove option in that selection to take the Previous selection out of what I'm removing from the working set, it works.
Kent Cooper, AIA