About CAD application profiles

The Advanced File Management add-on uses CAD application profiles that specify in which application to open CAD drawings that have been downloaded in an archive file. A CAD application profile is simple a key between a document in Meridian Project Portal and its corresponding executable on a user's computer. Each Meridian Project Portal document may specify one application profile. However, different documents may specify different application profiles to support different CAD applications and even different versions of those applications, for example, AutoCAD 2010, AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD Mechanical 2010, and SolidWorks 2011.

The process of opening a CAD drawing in the CAD application is illustrated in the following figure and described in the following text.

For a particular CAD drawing, the name of the application profile to use is stored as the value of a custom document property named PROFILE. The value is transferred in a batch file (run.bat) included in the archive file (cadfiles.krd) to the client computer. An Advanced File Management executable (cadref.exe) on the client computer extracts the archive files to the working folders and reads the application profile from run.bat. Cadref.exe then matches the application profile name with an entry in its configuration file (cadref.ini) to determine the CAD application path on the client computer and the startup parameters. Cadref.exe concatenates the CAD application path, local file name, and startup parameters into a command line and passes it to the operating system for execution.

Note    If the archive file also contains an AutoCAD script file with the extension .scr, it is appended with the /b switch to the command line after the startup parameters.

Configuring Advanced File Management on the Meridian Project Portal server and on the client computers is described in the following topics.