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Best Practices to Clean Drawings that Come From Outside Your Organization

November 30, 2020 Ryan Wunderlich
  1. Make a copy of the incoming Drawing and name it -fixed or -clean
  2. Open Civil 3D or AutoCAD, and then run the Recover on the drawing that you created above
  3. Let the drawing open, it will run a recovery operation and full Audit
  4. Type in PURGE and click Purge All until the button is greyed out (place checkmarks in all boxes highlighted below where possible)
  5. Now, type in -PURGE (with a minus sign)
    (This is the command line purge, the only way you can get to the Registered Applications)
    1. Type in RE, Regapps, or select Regapps
    2. Hit enter at this prompt
    3. Type or Select No at this prompt:
    4. Normally you should have 20 or less, if this list gets large, it will impact the drawing performance
  6. Save the file and the re-open with Recovery (Step 2) once more to ensure no additional errors are found.
  7. Save and now that file is clean and should be used for your projects.

As a Side Note, if you use these drawings as XREF's, then I generally recommend changing this System Variable to 1  (one) from the default of 0 (zero):

XREFREGAPPCTL (System Variable)

Controls whether the registered application (RegApp) records stored in an xref being loaded are copied to the host drawing.

About the Author

Ryan Wunderlich

Sr. Technical Support Specialist<br><br>An AutoCAD Certified Professional, Ryan is responsible for taking client cases and assisting with issues with the software - everything from regular glitches to software deployments and whatever else goes wrong. He's proficient in AutoCAD (including customization), VBA, LISP, and Civil 3D.

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