Multiple Drawings with Duplicate Handles

[yellowplanet]

Hi there,

I think I've stumbled upon a problem when using attribute extraction with multiple drawings and was wondering whether there's a way round it.

I need to extract attributes from multiple drawings into one Excel file and then run a macro on this file to check continuity between the drawings. I've been working on this for a while, with help from a colleague, and thought I'd come up with a solution last week.

However, once I started to look more carefully at the extracted Excel file I noticed there were quite a few blocks missing. I checked the drawings individually, doing attribute extractions, and they worked fine. The problem only occurs when I attribute extract on multiple drawings.

I've scratched my head about this for a few days now and have come up with a theory that it's something to do with the block handles. I think it might happen when AutoCAD has allocated the same handle to blocks on different drawings. When I then do the extraction it's only exporting one of the blocks into the excel file.

Am I right in thinking this?

Has anyone else come across the same problem?

Does anyone know a way around the problem?

It's a real shame because the excel macro that I'm using has taken quite a while to develop, but if there's no way around this it'll render it virtually useless.

I'm using AutoCAD 2005 full version (soon upgrading to 2008)

Cheers,

Jon

[irneb]

That's entirely correct. The handle is a text value created for each entity when it's created. This is only unique within the DWG, so it may be a "circle" (or anything else) in another DWG.

So you'd probably also need a column showing which DWG the line came from. Then before importing again, you should split this back into only the lines originating from the relevant DWG.