Merging reference files during a Save As

Original Article Date: Feb 1, 2002 

T-Bone Ray Bentley wrote this little number while taking a break from playing with the Voodoo DeVille Blues Band. It made it's first appearance on Bentley's own newsgroups before ending up here and reviews MicroStation V8's new features when merging reference files.

Merging Reference Files during Save As...
In MicroStation V8 08.00.02.02 the ability to optionally merge reference files when doing a Save As... to another file has been added. Merging reference files is useful when you wish to combine a file and its references into a single file for transmittal to an outside source. It is also useful when saving from a V8 file to another format that may not support the all reference attachments possible in V8.

When saving a DGN file to DWG or DXF, the options for merging reference files are available from the Reference Files tab page on the DWG Options dialog box.

There are three types of attachments that are not supported by AutoCAD.

Self Attachments: AutoCAD does not support attaching a reference file to itself. This is often used in MicroStation to create detail sections of a drawing. In order to preserve the display of self attachments it is necessary to merge self attachments.

Attachments to Non-Default Modes: In general, AutoCAD's support for multiple models within a file is much more restrictive than MicroStation and is limited to a single model per file with one or more sheet or “Paper Space” models displaying views of that model. AutoCAD's “XREF” attachments can display only these default models.

Masked Attachments: AutoCAD does not support the XREFs with clipping masks and therefore saving a masked attachment to DWG will remove any clipping masks applied to that attachment. If merging is selected then the clipping masks are applied to the geometry as it is merged.

The fourth attachment type, External Attachments, refers to any attachment that is not included in one of the types above – a standard attachment to the default model of an external file. AutoCAD XREFs can represent this type of attachment and it is typically better to save this to the as an XREF attachment (the default). However, if it is desirable to combine all files into a single output file, merging External Attachments can be specified.

For each of the types of reference file attachments, the following options are available:

Save: Save the attachment to the output file.
Merge: Merge the attachment geometry to the output file as individual elements.
Merge To Cell: Merge the attachment geometry to a single cell in the output file.
Omit: Omit the attachment from the output file.

Merging Reference Files When Saving As...To DGN Files
It is possible to specify that reference file merging be applied when doing a Save As... to DGN files. This can be useful for combining a file and its references into a single file.

The settings for controlling reference file merging are currently available through the keyin: SAVEMERGE SETTINGS, they will be more completely integrated into the user interface in a future version.

AskInga Article #99