Purge Registry Applicatons Utility

Last month, at the Civil CADD Consortium meeting James Maeding of Hunsaker & Associates, presented a utility that would address an issue that has haunted many a CADD user over the years. The issue locally was referred to as "file bloat".

This occurs when a seemingly blank drawing is inexplicably large in file size. Well, we now know that this occurs when data is introduced from one drawing into another via one of many methed (i.e. block insert, drag-and-drop). The registered application table of the first drawing is added to the table of the second. If I use that second drawing, erase all of it's entities and save that "blank" drawing to start a new drawings, my 'template" will be far larger than I would expect. Over the years some users found that a "blank" drawing may be as large as 2MB in size. The -PURGE command's suboption "R" will purge these registered applications only within the current drawing.

Back to the original comment, by clicking on the title of this post you will be taken to the download page at http://www.cadthinking.com/. Here you will find a utility (PurgeIDS 2007)that will purge the registered applications from multiple drawings simultaneously without the need of opening each file idividually. James demonstated how this can be done with dozens even hundreds of files quickly, saving a lot of time for an organization.

I want to thank James (and some Autodeskers who helped with this routine) for making this process much more streamlined.