Electrical Design Software | Elecdes Design Suite by Scada Systems Ltd

How to Generate a Drawing Index

Fundamentals

The Drawing Index report for an Ebase project is a list of the drawings in the project. The information in the Drawing Index is obtained from the title block on each drawing.

The Drawing Index Report

The Drawing Index report is a database format file named <ProjectName>DrawingIndex.dbf. It contains one record for each drawing in your project.

The columns of each record contain the data from the attributes of the title block on the drawing. The attribute data is extracted by a one-for-one match between the attribute names and the column names in the Drawing Index database format report.

You can change the columns in the Drawing Index report. See How to Customise Report Formats.

Title Blocks

You can and should use your company's title blocks. Title blocks should contain attributes for all of the information that should be included in your Drawing Index. They may also contain attributes that are not included in the Drawing Index.

There can be more than one title block on each drawing containing Drawing Index information. There should not be any common attributes between multiple title blocks on one drawing.

If a drawing does not have an identifiable title block, then the record for that drawing in the Drawing Index will contain data in only the file name and path columns.

Title Block File Names

Title blocks are identified by a file name pattern. You can change this file name pattern to identify the title blocks used by your company.

If you use more than one title block, then they should be named in a consistent manner to facilitate matching to a file name pattern. For example "TitleBlock1" and "TitleBlock2" can both be identified by the filename pattern "TitleBlock*".

Procedure

  1. Ensure each drawing has an appropriate title block.

    You can insert a title block using the Insert Border function in Elecdes.

  2. Save the current drawing, if it is currently open in a CAD session. This ensures that the drawing index function is not working with an old drawing file while the drawing session has new data.

  3. Run EBASE.

  4. Ensure your current EBASE project contains the required drawing files.

  5. Check the box for "Drawing Index".

  6. Press the "Compile Reports" button.

  7. As each drawing file in the project is processed a message will appear showing the drawing name and the size of the drawing file. Ebase caches unmodified drawings for speed. If drawings do not appear to be scanned on successive report generations, it is because they are cached.

    During cache scans there is a possibility that the database engine will be busy. You will be displayed a message indicating this and given options to wait or cancel.


The database format report, <ProjectName>DrawingIndex.dbf will be available in the current directory.

You may use Database Editor to view database reports.