Determine the origin of xref layers (bound and non-bound) - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] Once again, we're staying in our New Office Proposal.dwg file. Now, I am expecting you to have some knowledge of external reference files in this particular course. External reference files are often shortened to the abbreviation Xref. And what we're going to do is we're going to look at determining the origin of Xref layers. Now, there is an Xref attached to the New Office Proposal.dwg file. It's this little bit here. If I click on it, you can see that the ribbon there is letting me know it's an external reference by bringing in the contextual external reference tab and I can work with my reference there, like so, using various tools. Now, if that external reference file is not attached to your drawing, I need you just to hit escape there. Obviously if you've already got it attached. But if you go to the insert tab and there's the reference panel, click on this little arrow here and you can see there in the external references palette that my landscaping area is loaded. There's the landscaping area there, like so, and it's loaded and you can see there's a little dot there saying landscaping area.dwg. Dot and a slash indicating it's a relative file path. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to detach it, just in case you haven't got it loaded. So you go up to the flyout arrow here and you attach a dwg. And you can see there, there's my landscaping area drawing. You select it from the downloaded exercise files, click on open and you'll see there that you can attach it as an external reference, an Xref. So just look at the settings, scale un-ticked, all set to one. Path type relative. Rotation un-ticked, set to zero. Insertion point un-ticked and all set to 000. The block unit, millimeters one. Factor one should be grayed out anyway. Over here on the left, make sure it is an attachment reference type and all you've got to do there is make sure now that you just click on okay. That will then load it up, as you can see, into the drawing, like so. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to close the external references palette and you can see it's loaded up there on the end. It's a little extra landscaping area in the new office proposal drawing. Now, what we need to look at is the origin of the external reference layers, the Xref layers. So I'm going to jump back to the home tab on the ribbon and click on my layer properties here in the layers panel. Now, you'll notice Xref there, like so, if you click there, it filters them. And if you look at the name of the layer, it's got the Xref name and then the little vertical symbol there. I always forget what that's called. But you've got the little vertical symbol and then the name of the layer. So it's Xref name, layer name. If I go to all and just scroll down a little bit, can you see they're kind of grayed out compared to the rest of the layers in the drawing? So not only are they partially grayed out to highlight them, but also they've got the Xref name and then the layer name in the Xref next to them. So what that means is that the layer properties manager is showing you the Xref layers and they're displayed slightly differently. I'm just going to close the layer properties manager. So when you see a layer like that with a name, the vertical symbol and then another name, that means it's your Xref layer and it's highlighting that so that you know it's an Xref layer. Now, what you might do is you might bind your Xref to the existing host drawing. So what you might do is you might bind the landscaping area.dwg Xref to the host drawing, the new office proposal drawing. Now, before we do that, we need to do a save as. You don't want to overwrite your existing new office proposal drawing. So I'm going to go up to save as and in the folder where you've got the files I'm going to put new office proposal, like that, and underscore and I'm going to put bound, so that I know that my Xref has been bound to the new office proposal drawing. So I'll click on save and then to get rid of that big long file path again, just click on the save icon there and then it just shows you the drawing file name, which is now new office proposal bound. Go to the insert tab and we're going to go to that little arrow on the reference panel title there and there's the landscaping area Xref. Now, I'm going to right click on that and I've got the option to bind it. So that means it is then bound to the new office proposal drawing. Click on bind and you'll get the option there to bind to the drawing or insert it as a block. Now, I'm going to use bind in this case and click on okay. As soon as I do that, you'll notice the Xref disappears from the external references ballot. That's because it's now been bound and it's in here. Can you see now they are, it's a separate object? It's a block reference on layer zero, like so. So if I select that now, can you see it's a block reference? Now, if I now look at that and go back to home and back to layer properties, like so, you'll notice in the layers now, as I scroll down, there's extra layers in the drawing. Now, those layers have been brought in and you'll notice I've got a $0$. So that's letting me know that those layers have been brought into the drawing from the bound Xref. So you can see there they're from the landscaping area drawing $0$ and then the layer name, in this case hardstanding, landscaping or workstations. So you can see how that works when you've got a bound and a non bound Xref layer. Now, the other thing is you might want to insert that particular Xref. If you insert it, it brings it in as a block on the current layer. So it does it slightly differently. So what I'd like you to do is go away and try that. So I can click on layer properties manager, click on the cross to close it. If I undo a few steps, like so. So can you see there? If I now look at that and go to insert and go back here, can you see the landscaping areas back? I've just clicked on undo. I've used control Z on the keyboard. That's the keyboard shortcut. So if I now do that bind again and this time insert and click on okay, again, the Xref disappears from the external references palette and you'll notice it's there. Now, it's inserted again. It's still a block reference, like so. But if I go back to home and back to the layer of properties and scroll down a bit, what you'll notice is there is no extra Xref layers. Can you see that? It's been inserted as a block on layer zero. So it's just come in on the current drafting layer, like so. So you can see there that it works differently and you get different layer names, layer prefixes and so on. So I'll just close the layer properties manager and that's one that is really worth investigating, not just for your exam, but if you're working with Xrefs all the time, it's incredibly useful when you need to bind an Xref to an existing host drawing. It's useful tool, because then you know what all those extra layers are and where they've come from, because a bound Xref layer will still give you the Xref drawing name and the Xref layer, even though it's not an attached Xref anymore.