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This is my first post. Although I feel like I may have posted on this forum before. I've definitely used the advice I've found here in the past. I have a question that CAD users who deal with vast quantities of drawings might have some answers to. I work for a company that has a database of scanned drawings some of which date back nearly 200 years. There are over 10,000, mostly in a .rlc file type. Since AutoCAD has been around there are also a few thousand .dwg files on our server. We used to search through the drawings using a program that someone here wrote. You'd type in a search term in 1 or more of the fields and it'd bring up a list of relevant drawings. You could then click on any of them for a preview and then save to your local hard drive or where ever. Unfortunately, the old program doesn't work on windows 7 and the server it's on is also being updated so we need to migrate everything to a new server and we need a new method of doing the same thing as the old program did. Apparently the database information is in a standard format SQL database or something and I've seen an excel spreadsheet that shows all the fields and the data. A rep came along and showed us Autodesk Vault which seemed very nice, but a total overkill for what we need to be able to do, not to mention that it would cost a fortune every year to have. So basically does anyone use, or know of a simply program that can replace our old one? Ideally it could preview the rlc files but that is probabaly a very specific function for what would otherwise only need to be a very basic search and retrieve type program. Thanks in advance for any help on this.

Having some fun with dbConnect... it appears pretty easy to gather information from a database and apply it to a DWG, however it doesn't seem possible to summarize that data (e.g. "how many of these objects are in drawing"). For example, if the database contained window information and several types of windows were used multiple times, it should be possible to link each window to the database and then query the drawing to determine the number of each, and total cost. Window Count Cost Total TypeA 5 $250 $1250 TypeB 7 $200 $1400 Failing that, if the database could be updated (actually, this would be much better) with a new record for each new object, the database could perform the summary (and many other useful things). However, its appears the "Link..." can only pick an existing record from the database. Both seem unavailable from what I've seen of the application and the documentation. Please tell me I'm wrong! :-) IMHO, its surprising that attribute definitions are capable of so much more. Filling tables, linking to Excel, etc., should be small time for a database connection. Thanks