Organizing drawings with AutoCAD - 5 Section

24.3 Management of external references

When a drawing contains numerous external references and these, in turn, a good number of layers and various elements, its control could become complicated. In many cases, in addition, we may use an external reference in a drawing for purposes of collating with another part of the design, but once it has been checked, it does not make sense to keep the reference on the screen for a certain period of time. Remember that external references not only consume redraw time on screen, but can also fill it with elements that, for periods, it is useless to maintain. Considering also that this is the idea that underlies external references, to serve as a reference that is not permanently required in the work, these must be easily discharged (or recharged again, as the case may be) or even eliminated from the drawing. For these and other tasks, Autocad includes a dialog box that serves, precisely, to manage external references. The corresponding command is Refx.

For its part, it is very likely that once a design project is completed, it is integrated into a single Autocad file, making the external references an intrinsic part of the final drawing, as if it were a block. This avoids the danger of the file being edited or deleted on the network. To join an external reference to the drawing, we use the corresponding option of the contextual menu that we saw in the previous menu.

The difference between the two options is how the reference objects will be integrated into the current drawing. In both cases, the reference integrates all its blocks, layers, text styles, views, SCP and other objects with the name it contains. If we choose Unite, the name of all these objects will be preceded by the name of the file of the reference. If we use Insert, the name of the file disappears leaving only the name of the object. The risk is that the current drawing has layers, blocks or text styles, among others, that are called the same, so that those definitions of the reference to join would disappear (since the current drawing has priority over the reference).
It seems to me that, by a principle of order, users should always choose Join over Insert, although that depends on the working methods that each adopts.
Finally, there will be other cases, however, where it is convenient not to unite the external reference completely, but to take advantage of and join our current drawing its text styles, the blocks it contains, its loaded line types and even some of its layers with everything and its parameters already elaborated.
To take advantage of these individual resources that an external reference can contain, we use the Unirx command, a dialog box appears that presents a sorted list of reference objects that can be joined to the current drawing. The procedure is then clear: click on the desired object and click on the Add button.
Once the object is attached to the current drawing, it no longer matters if the reference is deleted, since it belongs to the drawing.