Power of the Triad—Effectively Manage Xref and Xref Layer Property Overrides in AutoCAD (Repeat)

NABAYAN ROY: Thank you, everyone, for registering for this class. I'm Nabayan Roy. I'm a principal learning experience designer and a product owner with the AutoCAD development team.

And I have my co-speaker, Karen Mason. She is the principal user experience designer on the same team. So we both work on the same team. And we both worked on the same features that we are going talk about it today.

So just a quick class summary. Today we are going to talk about how-- Or rather demo show you how you can effectively manage xref layer property overrides. Like if you have been facing this challenge of managing xref layer property overrides in your drawings, how you can use these system variables, the three system variables. The VISRETAIN, the XREFOVERRIDE, and the VISRETAINMODE mode, which is the latest, the newest sysvar that we have introduced in AutoCAD.

And then the other part will talk about some of the new, the feature enhancements to the external reference feature in AutoCAD. How it has become more smart and really enhances your productivity, managing xrefs and missing file references.

So hopefully by the end of this class, you would have learned something about how to manage your xref property overrides. How to use those three system variables in conjunction. How you can now quickly fix your missing reference files in AutoCAD. And basically also how you can now use the Layer Manager and the ability to quickly reset your xref overrides, visualize them. It's more intuitive.

So the way we have set up this whole class is to be more contextual. We'll take one portion or one section. And then Karen will demo that section, so that we have that context there. And it's much easier for people to learn and absorb as we proceed.

Who are you? So you might be an expert or intermediate user or just coming to this class and trying to learn and learn about the tips and tricks about this sysvar. Or probably we put a very curious title. And that's fascinated you. Or maybe the last one, I don't want to really have that one, that other classes were full. And that's the only class that has still some vacant chairs. So you are here.

So, guys, sit back relax. We are onto a journey to the land of xrefs and xref layer properties. So hopefully, we'll all enjoy this right.

So a quick recap before we actually start on the xref layer properties because our main, you know, the hero is xrefs. That's where it all starts with. We all know about xrefs and how drafters love xref.

And today Andrew was talking about the old world, the analog world. I think an equivalent of xref would be in the old days when drafters used to put the tracing paper of your drawing on your full base site. And that just-- That is a relative equivalent of what we call today as xrefs.

They really help keep your size of your file lean. You don't need to really include them in your drawing. They are links to your drawing, host drawing. You can quickly update your host drawing, your current drawings, whenever there is a change made in your xref.

So there are lots of benefits of using xrefs. And that's why it's one of the most commonly used objects in AutoCAD, like why drafters love using xrefs.

And just to help recap what it looks like today. This is the external reference manager, the palette. You have the top portion, what we call as the file reference pane and the details pane. You have your details about your drawing.

You have the tree view, the list view. And you can do the contextual menu on each of the drawings. You can reload those other options for whenever you attach an xref.

And you can xref a lot of things in AutoCAD, like not just DWG's but images, PDFs, coordination model. So there are tons of things you can xref. But--

KAREN MASON: I just wanted to interject there and say that one of the things I hear people say a lot is they didn't know that there was a tree view. It's over here on the right hand side. The default always shows your xrefs in a list view. But there is a tree view, so that you can see the nested relationships of your xrefs.

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah, thanks, Karen, for pointing out because the nested relationship is so important because sometimes when we talk about-- Or when we go to that part, then we talk about the missing xrefs. Well how exactly the nesting really is a cause of concern. And that view really helps to understand why it doesn't load or reload.

So how do you like-- You know, AutoCAD has this smart thing in your status bar. Whenever if you have an attached xref in your drawing. And there are some changes to the xref, you automatically get your notification. If you have set it up, the xref notify. And you get an icon there. And if it says you need to reload your external reference files.

And you can update your reference drawing through various techniques. You can directly go into reference manager. On right click, you can do reload. But I know many of people, I don't know whether they know that you can also use the command line option of dash xref reload asterisk. And that will quickly reload your xref files.

KAREN MASON: Yeah, the handy part about the command line is you can reload all your xrefs at once using the asterisks as a wild card for all.

NABAYAN ROY: For-- Yeah. OK, so now coming to the-- So if xref was the king of my story, she would be the queen probably. The xref layer control.

So we know that one of the things or challenges we face as drafters is, how do we manage the xref layer property overrides that happen. We want to do it selectively. Not like if there are some changes in your xref layer properties, like visibility or line type, you don't want to reload everything. Probably reload selectively some properties and keep some intact, whatever it is the value in your xref.

So that's been a challenge for a long time. And this whole class is all about telling you how you can now do that so smartly. So these are the three commands. I think VISRETAIN goes back to historically like R12, I don't know.

Can I-- How many people have used R12 here. There, oh, great. So I haven't. So I was too young at that time, just finishing my engineering probably. But R12, and then we introduced XREFOVERRIDE in 2016. And the latest one VISRETAINMODE is on 2018.1. Have folks updated to 2018.1 that have used VISRETAINMODE? Yes? Great. So there is a gentleman there.

OK, so we'll start with this. That's what I was calling the section. So we'll talk about VISRETAIN. It controls layer properties for all xref-dependent layers. And we'll show you how to work VISRETAIN.

It's nothing new, as such. It's been there for a long time. But what we want to really show is how you need to use this whole sysvar in conjunction to get the best benefit out of it, not just in silos.

So to work with xref, I think what I'll just do is we'll demo how to work that xref with VISRETAIN sysvar. So Karen will switch. And we'll take you to AutoCAD. That's what we love to see.

KAREN MASON: OK, so what first I'm going to do is I have this drawing with an xref attached. And I have VISRETAIN set to zero. For people who went back to R12, you probably remember that was the setting for VISRETAIN as a default.

And what that meant was that in my host drawing here, I can go and change all these xref layer colors to, let's just say, to eight, to gray. And there's a reason why a few things are not changed to gray. I've got some doors here that are still in green. And these circles in red. And this table in red. They're actually all supposed to change to gray. But that's the XREFOVERRIDE we'll talk about in a second.

So when you have VISRETAIN set to zero, if I now open up the xref drawing, and I make some changes to the xref layers. Let's just say I change all of them to green. And I save the drawing.

And now I'm going to switch back to my host drawing. And as Nabayan pointed out, there's a couple of ways to reload. You can either just use the balloon notification in the lower right hand corner. Or right click on the xref. Or click on the status.

So I'm just going to use the balloon notification. And you'll notice that the-- In this case, because VISRETAIN was set to zero, it updated all those xref layers. And it completely ignored all those overrides that I had set. Like, I had said I wanted-- In this host drawing, I had said that I wanted all the xref layers to be eight.

But when VISRETAIN is set to zero, it says don't-- This is our new layer settings dialog that we added in 2018. And the explanation for VISRETAIN zero says, don't retain overrides to xref layer properties.

So that means that anytime I make changes in the xref drawing, I want those changes reflected in my host drawing. The opposite one is this setting, which is VISRETAIN 1, that says, always retain my overrides.

So in this case, I'm going to go back to-- Right now, we've got all the xref layers are set to green. I'm going to go back to the xref drawing and just do an undo, and re-save the drawing. Go back to the host, and reload.

Now in that case-- Oh, I think I didn't-- What did I do wrong? VISRETAIN is set to one. Oh, I didn't change it.

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah, you didn't--

KAREN MASON: Sorry about that. I'll have to redo that again. OK, so now I'm saying-- I mean, it doesn't really matter what you do. But I'm going to change in the host drawing. I'm going to change all the colors to eight because that's what I want. I want them to be-- I want the xref layers to display in the host this way.

And now I'm going to go back to my xref drawing. Change everything to green. Save the drawing. Go back to the host. Reload. Now in this case, because I've set VISRETAIN to one, no matter what changes I make in the xref drawing, there's going to be no effect in the host drawing.

See. So I reloaded that xref. Even though back in the xref drawing, I had changed all those layers to green, it has no effect on the host drawing. And I think we're back to you.

NABAYAN ROY: Right. So any questions, probably we'll take it at the end. Or do we want to take-- Because we have a lot of content. So probably if you have any questions about any of these sysvars as we go, just park it with you and we'll take it.

So the VISRETAIN was the first of the sysvar that was introduced to control layer properties for xref-dependent layers. And then in 2016, we introduced XREFOVERRIDES.

Now a little about XREFOVERRIDE is basically, for those objects that are not set ByLayer, if you use the setting, it almost treats it that they are set to ByLayer, depending upon which value.

The default is zero. And you can set it to one. And I just want to point out, that XREFOVERRIDE and VISRETAIN are both settings that are saved in the drawing. So that's a different thing.

So as Karen was showing you about the VISRETAIN mode, we can see this thing. We'll go about this task about to change xref color when it does not set to ByLayers.

Now you have an object that you have specifically not set at ByLayer. And how does it react when you use VISRETAIN and XREFOVERRIDE in conjunction? So do you want to--

KAREN MASON: Yeah, I'll show you that. So I previously had told you that in this drawing there's a few objects that didn't get changed to eight, as I had really wanted. And that's because in the xref drawing these things we're using an actual color of red, as opposed to set to ByLayer.

But the magic of the XREFOVERRIDE is it basically says, yeah, that's OK. I don't care what's going on in the xref drawing. Just pretend everything is set to ByLayer magic.

Anything in that drawing that was using a color override is now treated as if it was ByLayer. So those couple of double doors that were still stuck in a green color, or these red circles, or the red table, now are switched.

Now I'll just undo that, so you can see it again. And then the XREFOVERRIDE setting is a system variable. But you can also get to it in the layer settings dialog. Basically it says, treat xref objects as if they're set to ByLayer.

So when I hit OK, and close this dialog, you'll see those red and green things will just get switched back to gray again.

NABAYAN ROY: Right. And just to make a point, Karen, if you can bring that layer settings. So we moved that setting. It was previously in options.

KAREN MASON: Oh, the setting for VISRETAIN, the two radio buttons, this one and this one. This is VISRETAIN 1 and this is VISRETAIN 2. Previously those were in the Options dialog.

NABAYAN ROY: So now we kind of have all of them within this whole single dialogue, so that all system variables that control the layer property, xref layer properties, you can play with them in a single place. OK.

So we just went through this whole thing about how when you set it, even if you have not set it to ByLayer, how that other object acts as if it is set ByLayer when you set XREFOVERRIDE. Using XREFOVERRIDE, it doesn't matter. It just treats it like, presumes that it's set to ByLayer.

So the latest kid on the block is the VISRETAINMODE. Now just to give you a context, what we have heard is that, oh, VISRETAIN is fine. And the XREFOVERRIDE is great. And they were great in conjunction.

But now as drafters we either need to load everything from the xref. And that takes away all my overrides. So they are gone. Now I want a mechanism where I can selectively choose which overrides I want to keep in my host drawing and which ones I want to reload or load every time from my xref.

So we heard this and we found that we need to address this challenge for drafters. So we introduced VISRETAINMODE, which is in the 2018 update, 2018.1. And if you are on the latest, I think there is one gentleman who is already using VISRETAINMODE. And he can understand what is so magical about it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KAREN MASON: Great, a fan.

NABAYAN ROY: We do a little magic sometimes. Now you can just selectively retain your xref layer properties. You need to pay attention to this particular portion. It's a little complex. It might get a little complicated. But I think you are in good hands. Karen's demo so that we will take you how you can do this whole thing.

It's all based like-- It's a bitcode sysvar. So for those command line users, you can set it up from the command line. But there is a new generation who loves UI. So we put this whole thing in the UI.

If you notice this, all the layer properties are there. So as I said, you can add these values. If you refer to AutoCAD help, the values are all there. So you can add whichever overrides you don't want or want, put that value. So I would switch over to the demo portion, to how you can now do selective VISRETAIN.

KAREN MASON: So the problem with the limited capability of VISRETAIN 0 or 1, it was either all or nothing. So you were either always reloading all the xref properties when VISRETAIN was set to zero. Or when VISRETAIN was set to 1, it sort of meant that your xref layers where-- It was like a snapshot in time of when you first attached the xref, now any changes that happened out in the xref would always be ignored. And all of your settings were controlled from the host drawing.

So what we're going to do here is we're going to turn the VISRETAIN mode on here. And we're going to choose which properties do we want to have reload. Like maybe you don't care that an xref layer gets turned on or off or frozen out in the xref. You don't want to have that change happen in your host drawing.

Let's just say, for example, you didn't want the doors layers to get turned off just because somebody turned it off in the xref. So you might not want to check those things to sort of reload or sync up with the xref. But maybe you do want the color, line type, and line weight to sync up when you make changes in the xref.

And then I'm going to-- In this xref drawing, I'm going to look at the door layer. And I'm going to change the color of it from green to red. And I'm going to change the line type of it from continuous to an ISO dashed. And the line weight to a 0.5 millimeter.

And you can see the changes happened in the drawing. All those doors and these other red objects that I set around the door layer, those have-- They're now a little thicker. They're dashed. And they're red.

And if you notice, in the layer palette, there's like a little different icon to indicate when xref layers have an override. That's just one method where you can see.

Previously, you would've had no way of knowing. If you made these changes in your host drawing, you wouldn't know if these color, line type, line weight settings, were coming from the xref itself or if you had changed them in the host. There was there was no way of knowing that.

And now I'm going to go to the xref drawing. And I'm going to change all the colors to green. And I'm going to change the line weight-- No, sorry, the line type to the same ISO dashed. And the line weight to 0.13. And the transparency to 50. And I'll save this drawing.

And now when I go back to the host drawing, I've told it that I want to retain-- Or I want to reload the color, the line type, and the line weight. So if the xref changes, go ahead and update the color, line type, or line weight. Except if I had set an implicit override.

So in the case of this door layer, where I've said, no, in this host drawing I want that door layer to be red. And I want it to be fat. And I want it to be dashed. That property is going to stay because it's an override. But all of the other color, line type, and line weight settings that I had set, those will reload.

So I'm going to reload the xref here. And I'm going to undo it, and redo it, just so that you can see that. See basically all those xref layers updated except for the ones that I had implicitly set as an override. And I think I'm back to you.

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah, and just before you-- If you can just show the sysvar from the command line, the bitcode, how whatever values. Like you have done it from the UI portion, like as Karen showed you. But you see that the cumulative value of the three layer properties that you set was 112.

Now, depending upon what layer properties you're always working with, and you want to reload, unless there is an override. You can directly key it from the command line. But the UI is more intuitive because sometimes you need to visually see it.

It's a bit-- For the first time when you start working with this command, it gets a bit challenging because you need to pay attention to those two words in parentheses, except override.

So if you have done an override, and you have checked something in this UI, it doesn't. It will not reload from the xref. It will always honor your host drawing settings. So we honor the host drawing settings. But if it's not an override, then we'll always pull it. OK, so we'll go to the next.

So the next task we want to show is now how you can set the xref layer property overrides background color, right? So to make it more intuitive, like Karen just showed you, now you have-- If you're paying attention to the status icons, we have now introduced more status icons in the Layer Manager for an xref.

So now, if it's a viewport override on an xref override, you can now differentiate looking at those icons. But sometimes you don't-- The icons are small. Sometimes it doesn't really-- You can't see that. But to make it now more visually easy to recognize overrides, you can now set those things from the UI, OK.

KAREN MASON: Yeah, so in this case, I've only got one xref layer that has some overrides. And then we've got a little toggle here to turn on the highlighting. You can control-- We've always had, for a viewport overrides, a highlight color to indicate which layers and which properties had an override. This is new that we're now showing you xref layers that have an override.

By default they use the same background color. But if you prefer, you can change your background color to something else. And it's off by default. Because if you had set a lot of overrides-- maybe you had picked all your xref layers. And you'd set it to a gray. I did that in my working life pretty much all the time. That highlighting is a little distracting to be looking at all times.

So it's kind of a little bit easier on the eyes to just either refer to the icon or toggle the highlighting on and off as you are interested in seeing which layers have the overrides.

NABAYAN ROY: And the other thing we'll continue with, the other demo, is now you can easily reset. Now once you have set to your overrides, just like you could reset viewport overrides, we made it quite easy. I think it's in the demo. So you can now-- Sorry.

KAREN MASON: Sorry, I thought you were on that slide. Yeah, so at this point, now I've changed all of those xref layers to eight. What if I'd made a mistake? What if I really wanted some of those extra layers, or maybe all of those extra layers, to be set to what they currently are in the xref?

So in this case, they're all green. You know what? I'll undo that stuff. Because it's probably more likely that you would have a drawing that would be set with a lot of different colors. Now come back to here. And I'll reload that xref. And of course, it's not taking any of those changes because I have all these overrides.

There's a lot of different ways you can do it. The fastest way is to select on the xref overrides and right click, and do-- reset all properties. I'm going to undo that.

And another way to do it is selectively. So I could pick on just particular layers. And I can right click. And now you can choose, well, do I want to reset the xref overrides for the selected layers, all layers, or which selective properties? So I could just say, well, I just want the color to be reset. Everything else I'd want to have set to whatever it was in the host drawing.

So a lot of different ways for resetting. And that was something we never could do before. It's like, once you made that change in the in the host, now if you went to your xref and made some changes, you're never going to be able to get your host to update without changing to VISRETAIN off to zero. And reloading the xref.

But now that's for everything. There was no selective way of choosing which xref layers you wanted to sync up with the xref and which ones you wanted to have the same as they were in the host.

NABAYAN ROY: Right, and if you have noticed, like what Karen did was, on your left hand side in the tree view, you now have XREFOVERRIDE. That's the new filter. It isn't there in 2018. It's only there in 2018.1 when we introduces VISRETAINMODE.

So that's an easy way to reset your xref overrides from there. Just use the filter option. And the other thing is the icons that's there, right now I don't think we have a viewpoint override icon. But--

KAREN MASON: Oh, yeah. But I could do it. So we go to the viewport. And I change some of these xref layers. And I'm going to change the viewport color to blue. Now you see those got a-- They have a different icon. And there's a Tooltip when you hover over the status icon.

This has actually always been there for viewport overrides. What's new is the different icon and Tooltip for an xref override.

NABAYAN ROY: Right, so basically, what we are now-- We have three icons for overrides. Like if it's xref overrides only, if it's viewport overrides only, and then you have xref and viewport override.

So that's another mechanism where you can quickly distinguish which overrides, what type of override it is. So that makes it more intuitive for our users. So I think, yeah, we have one more demo. We have a few more demos, rather.

So the next one, now we introduce another called xref layer. Now what it does is now, just like if you have used DIM layers. So this is a new default layer for your xrefs. You can now set or use this sysvar for all your xref layers. The default value is one for xref.

KAREN MASON: No, the default value is, dot, or which means, use current. So it's basically the same as legacy behavior of just use-- whenever I attach an xref-- just insert it on the current layer, like anything else.

NABAYAN ROY: Right. You want to show this?

KAREN MASON: Yeah, so xref layered system variable works very similar to some other layer variables.

NABAYAN ROY: Like a DIM layer.

KAREN MASON: Yeah, we have like DIM layer, hatch layer. So here I've got a blank drawing. And I'm going to do xref layer. And as I said, the default is, it's either a dot or use current. And I'm going to change-- I'm going to call it xref.

Now notice, this drawing doesn't have a layer called xref. I'm just specifying that in this drawing, when I do attach an xref, I want it to use-- I want it to attach it on the xref layer. So I'm going to just attach this.

And you see the brand new layer got created called, xref. And that is the layer that the xref was inserted on. I'll select the xref. And you can see, it just automatically created it. So if you prefer to have your xrefs always go on layer zero, or layer xref, or whatever you want, you can set that up in your templates.

NABAYAN ROY: Right, so the next thing-- So just to summarize, what we went through the three sysvars is these are the default values where it is saved. And if you look at VISRETAIN mode, it's saved in registry. The other two are saved in drawing.

And these are some of the recommendations we would give you if you are using, especially for VISRETAIN mode, which is 2302. So by default, it is not on. So that you know, as Karen said, we wanted to honor the VISRETAIN behavior. And then you can use this bitcode sysvar to make selective changes to the xref layer properties for xref-dependent layers.

So this kind of completes our VISRETAIN, VISRETAINMODE, and sysvar. I want to quickly show you-- Do you want to go through some of the xref new features? I can demo it in my drawing.

KAREN MASON: I think you need to demo.

NABAYAN ROY: Sure. So I'll just switch from here. OK, I need to restart you.

KAREN MASON: Does anybody have any questions on--

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah, in the meantime, if you-- We would be--

KAREN MASON: --the VISRETAIN and VISRETAINMODE? Yeah, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: If I put the xref on a layer other than zero, do I still have the same functionality as I would from zero?

KAREN MASON: Yes. The question was if you put your xref on any other layer, does it still have the same functionality? Yeah, I mean, all the xref layer system variable does is just control which layer the xref is inserted on by default.

Now it does have some effect on things like blocks that are set to ByLayer and that kind of thing.

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Is imaging reflected in this too?

NABAYAN ROY: Image, no.

AUDIENCE: --[INAUDIBLE] are they being controlled by the same xref properties?

KAREN MASON: I don't--

AUDIENCE: Or do they have their own [INAUDIBLE]?

KAREN MASON: I don't think they are. Let me just test that out. I think the xref attaches only for DWG xrefs.

AUDIENCE: What if you have [INAUDIBLE]?

NABAYAN ROY: So--

KAREN MASON: Yeah, no, the xref layer only controls DWG xrefs.

NABAYAN ROY: Right. So we talked about the other portion where there has been some series of enhancements to the xref feature in general to make it a little more smarter. So I'll just demo some of the key enhancements.

So I'm just trying to attach, let's see. I'm trying to attach a DWG. And if you notice this now, the default is relative. It used to be fixed. So we switched-- made that switch. You can change that to an xref path. And you can set whichever you wanted.

KAREN MASON: And the key here is that's a brand new drawing. It hasn't even been seen saved. So you could never save a relative path for xref.

NABAYAN ROY: Right. If you look at that and-- What am I doing here? OK, let me--

AUDIENCE: How should your focus structure be set up? Should it be set up as a parent/child relationship? Or can it be essentially just like-- I have this argument within my company where, here's the files. And then outside of that file is where the xref files are stored.

It relatively still will save. But is there a preference or a suggested guideline where you have a parent? Here's the folder within the folder, you have the xref folder.

KAREN MASON: I don't think it matters. I think that's company preference. What is key, though, is you can't use different mapped drives. So you can't have-- And still use relative pathing. So that's one key. But it doesn't matter really if the host is at a layer lower than the children. I mean, I generally tended to keep the children--

AUDIENCE: There's no kind of sequence change--

KAREN MASON: No.

AUDIENCE: --difference or anything like that? As long as it's on the same drive, it's fine.

KAREN MASON: Yeah.

NABAYAN ROY: Right. So now if you see, I attached an xref. And this drawing is not yet saved. So now, it still is giving-- It's like an asterisk is there. But it allows you to insert with the relative path.

Now, this is one of the keys to how to minimize the broken path that is a common occurrence for all people who use, extensively use, xref. And then it holds this like-- We won't get into the mechanism of how. But once you save the drawing, it then assigns the path. If you see again, now, it has assigned a relative path there. I'll attach another xref here.

KAREN MASON: Because a lot of people would like to-- They'd setup their default to relative. But then the problem was, if you started a brand new drawing, and you attached a xref, it couldn't save it as relative. So it would switch it to a full or absolute path.

And then it remembers that the next time. So even now when you're in a drawing that's already been saved, it used to just know, oh, well the last time you inserted an xref, you used a full path, so I'm going to use a full path.

And that's-- All these full, absolute paths were kind of the things that would cause a lot of xref to break. Because when people would move the whole project from one place to another, get a new server, have a different server name, relative paths are your friend. But because all these xrefs got inadvertently attached with full or absolute.

So now there's a system variable that can control what path type to use, it's a rough path type. And it will still use that even with brand new unsafe drawings, which is sort of the key to keeping all your xrefs as relative path.

NABAYAN ROY: Right, so what I did right now is I attached a couple of xrefs, like dummy ones. And I then moved that from one folder to another folder, which is typically how people work. When you want to carry files from your office, you take a USB and carry it back to Home, and then insert. And then suddenly in your xref palette, they've all gone haywire.

So I'll try to-- Hopefully it should work. OK, good. So this is the most common thing you have seen now. If you notice this, there is a subtle change. Now it tells you the number here. And the terminology has changed. We say, not found.

It used to be, unresolved references, which was a bit vague. That didn't make sense to many of our users. So we kind of made it very clear what the problem is. Then you go to, let's say, open here. And then I pick one. And then I do, select new path.

So these are the new options that's there in your external reference manager, select new path. For those who have been using the External Manager or the utility--

KAREN MASON: Reference-- External-- Reference Manager.

NABAYAN ROY: Reference manager, right thanks, Karen. That's been there. The Find and Replace has been there. We just brought that in now into the External Reference Palette. But this is new. So if you look at this, what it does--

KAREN MASON: Yeah, because before you used to have to go down into the details pane in order to change the path.

NABAYAN ROY: I know this is my drawing. I opened it. Now you look at this. Now this is what--

AUDIENCE: This is the cool part.

NABAYAN ROY: This is the cool part. Thanks for it. So this is the cool part. Now you have tons, like this is just two. That's not a real world scenario. Now, if you have tons of drawing, now AutoCAD smartly scans your folder. And it sees that there's all this-- it had relative path, now have a new path. Just keep an eye on that. So everything is resolved.

So it's just reducing the number of clicks and the number of right clicks to help save your time and enhance your productivity. So that's some of the key things that we have introduced in the xref manager. And we wanted to just demo them for people who have not yet experienced that.

And with that, I think that brings us to the end of our session. One key thing, I would request everyone is to-- You know, every year people love experiencing here where it's a great platform to interact with Autodesk different speakers.

But the content, to help evaluate the content. How is the presentation? I think your feedback matters. So if you can just take a couple of minutes. And go to the app and give your feedback.

But we have around 10 minutes. If there are any questions, please feel free to. Or if you have any suggestion, we can talk.

AUDIENCE: Layer control is nested references. So if you've got xref directed to another xref, is that into your host drawing? So you've got an [INAUDIBLE]. And [INAUDIBLE].

Any change that you might see and you say, oh, well, I'm know I'm going to want this consistent background in [INAUDIBLE]. So you want those layered sections just to be made once in eight middle files basically, in the nesting files, require referencing the sheet.

But what do you reference that in? Because none of those xrefs segments get carried through. So you'd have to export a layer state file and then [INAUDIBLE], or just manually apply those same layer overrides in your sheet file multiple times rather than it just being contained in that nesting file to be carrying through to your sheet.

So say, you've styled 50 sheets already. And you've been through [INAUDIBLE] were actually going to change like the background color, for this reference. You could do it once in a nested file could carried through. But it doesn't. So you have to do it 50 times in your sheet files.

NABAYAN ROY: Oh, in sheet files.

AUDIENCE: Did that make sense?

KAREN MASON: It's a little complicated.

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah, sheets.

AUDIENCE: Because we have like huge projects so it makes sense for the workflow now because we're Civil 3D [INAUDIBLE]. We don't want to be necessarily using just Civil 3D to generate sheets because of budget. So we have a separate sheet file of [INAUDIBLE].

KAREN MASON: Does the exporting the layer state work for you?

AUDIENCE: It does, but it means that you're still having to go into individual files and make that change rather than one consolidated sheet.

NABAYAN ROY: So you want the one place where you can do that. We hear that. So--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. Just because of how our workflow is just Civil 3D. It tends to do the design models that we have [INAUDIBLE], which references [INAUDIBLE]. Because we like to do [INAUDIBLE] files [INAUDIBLE].

NABAYAN ROY: So basically, you are looking at the layers, adding some enhancement to that so that it can apply to like--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] understanding [INAUDIBLE] file to xrefs, to that file.

NABAYAN ROY: Right, yeah, OK. I think it's a--

AUDIENCE: --and whether it [INAUDIBLE] something that if you, say, reference an xref onto a specific layer and then use your XREFOVERRIDE. Would that see it as an empty file layer and then change it to those settings? So let's say you want to [INAUDIBLE]. Create a layer to [INAUDIBLE]. And put your reference on that and then turn on XREFOVERRIDE [INAUDIBLE] ByLayer [INAUDIBLE].

NABAYAN ROY: It should. It should. That's--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

NABAYAN ROY: Yeah, yeah.

KAREN MASON: The XREFOVERRIDE was in 2016.

NABAYAN ROY: Right.

KAREN MASON: The-- Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Yes, the VISRETAIN.

KAREN MASON: The VISRETAINMODE mode is 2018.1.

NABAYAN ROY: Dot one, yeah. it's just like a few months.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

NABAYAN ROY: Right, yeah. But it's a good suggestion. Yeah, sorry.

AUDIENCE: Were you part of the development team that did this?

KAREN MASON: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Yes, OK, done. I haven't been able to do this since 2000. But personally, this was like a happy unicorn moment.

NABAYAN ROY: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: So thank you so much. Because when I updated, and I went to go check out the updates. And it did that. I was like, oh, I've been waiting for a decade for this concept. So first of all, thank you.

KAREN MASON: Well thank you.

AUDIENCE: It was wonderful, wonderful.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

NABAYAN ROY: No, it's a system variable.

KAREN MASON: Yeah, VISRETAIN and XREFOVERRIDE are saved in the drawing. VISRETAINMODE is a registry setting.

So the thought behind that was, you got a library of all drawings out there. Rather than you having to now go into every one of your old drawings and update your VISRETAIN setting to something else. No, go ahead and leave it at one. And just flip a switch in one place for VISRETAINMODE to say, update these certain layer properties. You choose which ones. And it'll work now for all your drawings. Any other questions?

AUDIENCE: Do all xrefs have to be in the same in order for your system to find them?

KAREN MASON: No.

NABAYAN ROY: No, no. You can do it-- There are multiple ways. Like if you have user options. There is a-- You can define the folders where you want AutoCAD to search for. You can do that that way.

There is no-- We don't recommend any way how you want to set different organization, have different structure, directory structure, how you want to give xrefs, the whole thing.

But what we now do is, if you have broken xrefs or missing files, we now help you to quickly fix them. Fix one, fix all.

AUDIENCE: I saw the directories. Where do you set that? Is there like a variable that you set as far as like where you search?

NABAYAN ROY: No, so basically what it does is you are selecting a new path for one missing reference. It scans that folder and sees are there xref files with that path.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KAREN MASON: Yeah, there's no change to the xref. Like when AutoCAD encounters a missing xref, there's no change to where it normally searches since xrefs were first added.

So if it can't find it in its saved path, it's going to look in the host drawing location. It's going to look in your support file search path. It's going to look, if you used the project name, I think it is, system variable. Whatever.

There's about four different places where it goes to look. None of that has changed. The only thing that's changed is when you encounter a drawing that has a missing xref, when you go to manually fix one, it will assume that, oh, you probably have a whole bunch of xrefs that are all in that same place. And we'll fix all the rest of them that are in that same place for you.

AUDIENCE: So say for example I have, say, 20 different legacy [INAUDIBLE]. Does it have the ability to select the most recent saved mode, the floor plan, first floor plan? Or is there--

NABAYAN ROY: If they are attached? Oh, you have not attached them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] just within our server.

NABAYAN ROY: No, no.

KAREN MASON: No. Like I said, no change to this legacy behavior that goes back a very long time. It's like, as soon as AutoCAD-- If it couldn't find it in the save path, it's going to start the search. And as soon as it finds one, it's done.

It doesn't bother to go and check out the rest of them. And then see, oh, OK, well, I found one in your working folder that's a month old. And the next one I find is in the host drawing location. And that one is dated yesterday. It's like, it just, as soon as it finds one, it just--

NABAYAN ROY: It goes by the file name probably, not by the other metadata that you have, like a version.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

NABAYAN ROY: Thanks. Yeah, like, we kind of-- yeah.

KAREN MASON: Yeah, when we were looking into more automated ways of fixing broken paths, we were talking about how do we sort of intelligently pick the best one. And then, you know, it's like--

NABAYAN ROY: I think one of the reservations we had based on what we have heard from, is like, we are not very sure about organization for the structure. Now if you remember when you have a missing xref and you encounter that message where it says, not found. And you want to fix it. We can do that.

But depending upon how deep is your folder structure, now it can go into a certain loop. Like it can be from milliseconds to 10 minutes, depending upon where you want AutoCAD to search. And that can be like, you know-- Even if it's happens in the background, it might slow your--