Special Save As Options That Affect Demand Loading

Special Save As Options That Affect Demand Loading
AutoCAD offers a few additional settings that boost the performance of the Demand Load feature. When you
choose File  Save As to save a file in the standard .dwg format, you see the Tools button in the upper-right
corner. Choosing Tools  Options opens the Save As Options dialog box. Using the options in the Index Type
drop-down list in the DWG Options tab can help improve the speed of demand loading. The index options are
as follows:
None No index is created.
Layer AutoCAD loads only layers that are both turned on and thawed.
Spatial AutoCAD loads only portions of an Xref or raster image within a clipped boundary.
Layer & Spatial This option turns on both the Layer and Spatial options.
In step 5 of the previous exercise, the Refedit command isolates the objects you select for editing.
You can’t edit anything else in the Xref until you exit the Refedit command and start over.
At this point, you can edit a block in an Xref. Now, let’s continue editing the kitchenette:
1. Zoom in on the kitchenette, and move the four burners to the right 8˝ (20 cm for metric users).
2. Erase the sink.
3. Click the Save Reference Edits button on the Refedit toolbar, or choose Tools  Xref And
Block In-Place Editing  Save Reference Edits.
4. A warning message appears, telling you that the changes you’ve made to the Xref will be
saved. Click OK.
5. Zoom back to your previous view. Notice that the other units reflect the changes you made
to the Unitxref Xref (see Figure 7.13).



6. Open the Unitxref.dwg file. The kitchen reflects the changes you made to the Xref of the unit
in the Planxref file. This shows you that by choosing to save the reference edit in step 3, you
save the changes back to the Xref’s source file.
As you saw from these two exercises, it’s possible to edit a specific block in an Xref, but to do that
you must select the block name in the Reference Edit dialog box.
In these exercises, you edited a block contained in an Xref, but you could have just as easily
edited a block in the current drawing. You can also edit nested blocks by using the Refedit command.
Changes in blocks in the current file don’t affect other files because blocks aren’t linked to
external files. The changes to blocks remain in the current file until you explicitly export the
changed block to a file, as you saw in earlier exercises.