Mapping Project xrefs in a social network chart

At the end of last year I had the thought that maybe it would be helpful to map all the xrefs of a project into a social network chart to see how a project had been put together using external references. I thought it would let you quickly see visually how  someone had set up the files and newbies would be able to see how I had put projects together in the past.

I posted a request in the forums to see if anyone had seen a tool along these lines, but the post received no replies. So I figured out away to do it reasonably quickly with some free lsp code available here and the social networking chart tool for Excel called Nodexl. The process is not as slick as i would of like but you get the idea.  Here is the workflow i used.

1. Copy and paste the lsp code from this forum post into notepad and then name the file something and add the .lsp extension.

2. Open cad and then type “appload” and browse and load the lisp file created in step 1. Type “Batchfindxref” to start the lisp program. Go to the project folder where you have all the dwg files for the project stored. How wait for the program to export a .csv file of the xrefs found in each file.

You should see something like this:-

3. Now go to the Nodexl website and download the free basic version. Once installed start the Nodexl template by going to start and type Nodexl. Now copy column A and B from the csv file into column A and B in the Edges tab of the Nodexl Template. You can now press the refresh button and the graph will update showing the relationships but with no labels on the nodes. To add labels to the Vertices go to the Vertices Tab and in column H add the name to be used. Now refresh the graph again and the labels will be added.

 

There are various options for the graph style you can try different types and re lay out the graph various times to get some thing that looks ok. You can then manually move the vertices to make the graph clear. Once you are happy you can right click on the graph and save an image file of the graph.

The graph is not the clearest with you have long file names and I have not found a way to rotate the text that would help with the overlapping labels.

I think it would be possible to program something up in cad (but do not have the time) that would do a similar thing with say multi leaders that are linked together and contains the xref name, layer , file path and hyperlinks to the file and maybe a thumb nail preview of what is in the file.