Does DWG IFilter 2007 expose drawing title data to populate SharePoint attributes
Q:
Can you tell me whether your IFilter will expose drawing title data for us to use to populate a SharePoint Title or Description attributes or properties in the document library? Ideally we would like be able to have this data populated automatically when drawings are uploaded.
A:
Our latest version of DWG IFilter 2007 does not expose parts of the drawing as separate property values. DWG IFilter 2007 exposes all available textual content for full text search. All visible text, reference names, attributes, definitions, and more is included in this full text for search.
The DWG IFilter 2005 version did expose specified block attributes as separated properties such as Title, Author and more. As we learned these values do not automatically load into SharePoint fields in the Document library, we have discontinued this feature.
If you have a good reason for us to add this functionality again; please tell us and we will investigate.
How does DWG IFilter 2007 support Property search
Many questions relate to the workaround for search with DWG files. As SharePoint is not able to read text from inside the DWG file without the use of a DWG IFilter, these contents cannot be used as a reference for search.
To enable search on drawing specifics without DWG IFilter, one approach has been to add the drawing specifics into attributes or properties added to the document library definition. The user needs to fill in these fields when saving the DWG into the SharePoint document library - or this process is automated from within AutoCAD. Having these fields filled automated usually means some AutoCAD add-in needs to be installed on each desktop computer.
With DWG IFilter 2007, the DWG files are fully enabled for search. All textual content is added to the full text index; including the drawing title values such as Title, Description, Author. Furthermore, the same level of detail is achieved for files stored in your network fileshares and other locations indexed by your SharePoint.