Wednesday

CAD Management: Layer Property Filters in AutoCAD

19 Comments Jan-14-2009 | Posted by Erhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

If you have this much of layers in your drawings, it is very difficult to choose the one that we will work on it among them. For this reason, AutoCAD has introduced property filters in layers window.

However, as usual I will assume that you have paid attention in naming layers while you work with them. In this list, you can see the layers created by a software that is prepared by our company. Prefix assigned to our company by AutoDESK is ‘TAL_’. So that’s why we are starting all the names of layers that we use in our programs with ‘TAL_’. By doing this, we are eliminating all the possible naming coincidences with layers that may be created by other software or the user. After the prefix, there is “2D/3D” part which shows that whether the layer belongs to a 2D or 3D drawing entity. The remaining part shows which module the layer is related to. Due to the fact that we have also assigned render material to layers, they start with ‘TAL_3D_RENDER_’. After explaining about our layer naming system shortly, let’s move on to the filter management window. First of all, I would like to remind you that the window shown in Fig. 1 is activated by LAYER command. The list that is on the left half of this window is reserved for filters. Let’s quickly create a new filter.

Fig. 2 – New property filter command.

By the help of button, seen in Fig. 2, let’s create our first layer property filter. As soon as we press this button, a new window shown in Fig. 3 will open up.

Fig.3 – Layer property filter definition window.

Each filter shall have a name. As we will list 2D layers in our first filter, I am selecting its name as ‘2D’ also. You can filter all of the layers according to all of their properties. In this context, due to the fact that we are only dealing with the name, we write ‘TAL_2D_*’ in the cell under ‘Name’. ‘*’ character is used as joker character in AutoCAD and means everything. In this case, we can see all of the layers starting with TAL_2D_. Anyway, you will already see only the 2D layers in the ‘Filter Preview’ window as soon as you write it. You have already noticed that, we can put more than one line in the definition of filter. In such cases, there is –AND- logical relationship between the lines, i.e. as if saying “list all the layers having conditions in 1st line and 2nd line”. For now, let’s close this window by saying OK, and prepare another filter similarly for 3D layers. Name of this filter will be ‘3D’ and its filter name will be ‘TAL_3D_*’. Finally, let’s create another one with ‘Render’ name and ‘TAL_3D_RENDER_*’ filter name.

Fig. 4 – While the filters are working.
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Now, the layer properties manager should look like as shown in Fig. 4. However, when we choose ‘3D’, layers related to render are also listed. This will make our work harder. For this reason, let’s right click on ‘3D’ filter and select ‘Properties…’ and let’s enter the filter definition again. (Fig. 5)

Fig.5 .

By the modification we have done in the filter name, we specified that we want to choose all of the 3D layers that start with TAL_3D_ but just after that does not include –R- letter. When we return back to the layer control window, we will see that we have almost made this list clear. Finally, let me list special characters that are used for name catching:

Table 1 – Joker character list.

Thats all. Hope see you again