Hi All,

We have a requirement to search within different Autocad documents but I am unable to get enough documentation on this. Please, guide me on this.

Thanks,

Rahul Babar

SharePoint's search engine uses add-ons called iFilters to be able to index the contents of a given document. Out of the box SharePoint ships with iFilters installed for most of the Office document formats, allowing it to automatically index the text contents of those documents without issue. Because it's such a popular document format, most organizations also install a PDF iFilter so the text in those documents can be crawled.

In order to be able to crawl the text within an AutoCAD document, you'll need to install an AutoCAD iFilter in your SharePoint environment. The only one I'm aware of for SharePoint right now is available for purchase from iFilterShop.com: http://ifiltershop.com/dwg-ifilter.html . I haven't installed it or worked with it myself, so you'll want to carefully take a look at their documentation to make sure that it works for your version of AutoCAD.

John

There are a few DWG iFilters available, and I believe AutoCAD 2010 includes one. There used to be one on the AutoDesk site, but I just did a quick search and could not find it.

Here's one: http://www.dwgindex.com/DWGFilter.html

also google/bing "ifilter autocad" for more info.

 

Try dwgCrawler .NET add-on from Tumpliner Software. It does require you to do some set-up of regular expressions to identify different categoriesyou want to crawl. Also you have to set up a schedule of base directories to crawl, and when to crawl them. It will pick up all texts, mtexts, attributes and block-embedded texts and mtexts. You can also supply regex to filter out data that you don't want to include in your searchable crawled data. Hard to beat the price-- freeware.

Actually you can find dwgCrawler at ncadaddons.tumpliner.com these days, and it has a better search capability. It is available for AutoCAD2009 and NanoCAD.