Dwg Data Crawler
The DwgCrawler program is a .NET add-on for use with AutoCAD 2008 and later. A crawler
program "crawls" a defined set of AutoCAD dwg files, pulling out all text, mtext, attribute and
block-embedded text or mtext values, and filtering and storing the data
under a particular data category.
To decrease the size of the searched database, a data category can be assigned to
its own database file. A database file can have more than one data category assigned
to it, but a data category must be contained within only one database file. Data categories
are also used to define data filters to avoid saving unwanted data.
Data crawling is controlled via a customizable schedule. The schedule defines when
the original crawl should be done for a given data category/root folder, as well
as how often subsequent crawls should recheck the given root folder for files that
have been updated since the last crawl.
The crawled data can be shared with any number of users on the same intranet (assuming,
of course, that all crawled files are stored on shared intranet locations), but
to minimize network traffic only the original installed program should do all the
data crawling per the crawl schedule. The original crawler program can selectively
"clone" all or a subset of its database files for the use of others. The cloned
set of files is then copied to another user's local directory. When the original
crawler finds more data from updated files it can store this new data in an XML
file in a common network directory. The clone program user may then elect to download
the new data and incorporate it into his local copy of the crawled data database(s).
The original data crawler program and all clone programs are capable of searching
their locally-resident databases for a single word, a quoted string, or a list of
words and/or quoted strings. Single words are indexed in the database and result
in a quick search. The first word in a word list acts as a filter-- only drawings
containing this first word will be searched to see if they contain any other words
in the search list. In view of this it is recommended to have the first word in
a search list be the least common word of all words in the list. Use single quote
marks ( ' ) rather than double quote marks ( " ) to demark a quotation to be searched
for. Although only exact quotes will be found, they can be contained within, and
do not have to be the complete textual value stored in the database.
A successful search will list all textuals found with the drawing/filepath
where
they were found. If the drawing/filepath is double-clicked the AutoCAD
dwg file will
be opened and the location of the found textual will be zoomed to.
New 1/1/2013 !!
Version 3.2
Improved search algorithm for quoted strings.
A re-crawl of your data is not necessary--
just replace only the DataCrawler2012_n.n_shareware.dll
file.
             
New 7/29/12 !!
A simple file download
and change-out
will allow you to use DwgCrawler with your
64-bit machine.