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.