About Docupoint

Docupoint’s DrawingSearcher provides a 21st century solution to solving the challenges of managing a large archive of AutoCAD drawings. Drawing files are typically kept for the lifetime of a facility, often 20 – 30 years. It is not uncommon for an organization to have tens or even hundreds of thousands of CAD files online. With such a large number of drawings, finding the correct file can be a time consuming and error-prone task. DrawingSearcher takes a unique approach to CAD file management by providing a Web-based full-text search application for AutoCAD drawing files.

With its latest version of DrawingSearcher, Docupoint sought to enhance its text search capabilities. In addition to providing search on text inside AutoCAD drawing files, Docupoint’s goal was to read all the text, attributes (visible and non-visible) and block names in all documents on a network and index them into a text search engine stored on the index server. For searching, Docupoint wanted DrawingSearcher to find drawings or other document types via a Web browser just like using a search engine on the Web.

Docupoint’s development team chose the dtSearch Text Retrival Engine to embed in DrawingSearcher. “We set out with the goal of developing the best possible search solution for AutoCAD,” said Brad Bishop, Vice President of Docupoint. “It quickly became apparent that the dtSearch Engine provided the highest level of functionality for our application. We were particularly impressed with dtSearch’s ability to handle mixed number and character strings as well as its fielded search capabilities. In addition, the dtSearch support team promptly and professionally answered our development support questions.”

“dtSearch Corp. is very pleased to be a part of Docupoint’s Web-based AutoCAD solution,” said Kate Tretter, dtSearch Corp.’s Director of Operations. “We encourage people looking to search their AutoCAD drawing archives to try the DrawingSearcher solution. It’s a great supplement to the dtSearch product line for the engineering world.”

DrawingSearcher takes advantage of the full range of dtSearch search functionality including:

Full text search

Documents can be located by any text or number string inside the file including visible and hidden attribute values.

Field search

For a more selective search, a drop down list allows the user to specify that the search will only retrieve drawings from a particular category. Field search capabilities also allow DrawingSearcher, for example, to limit a search to the title block area of the drawing.

User Thesaurus

Abbreviations are common in technical documentation. Docupoint’s implementation of the dtSearch user thesaurus allows the administrator to quickly identify the abbreviations used and associate them to the full word. For example, a search on “building” also finds the text string “bldg.”

Custom alphabet capabilities

Technical drawings often have alphanumeric strings such as “TB- 2877:02” that must be searched as a single word. Using dtSearch’s custom alphabet function, Docupoint was able to control how mixed text and number strings are indexed.

Advanced Boolean Searches

The tabbed interface of DrawingSearcher makes it easy for the user to issue Boolean searches without knowledge of the advanced search syntax.

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Using DrawingSearcher involves simply pointing a browser to the URL of the DrawingSearcher server. The built-in Web server provides the user with a tabbed “Portal” interface to select the type of search to perform (basic, advanced, title block and drawing number/XRef). After entering in the appropriate search criteria and submitting, a list of documents that meet the search criteria is immediately returned to the user’s browser. The user can select from a number of result display options including record type, list type and even a document preview presentation. Selecting on the file link automatically opens the drawing for viewing in the user’s browser.

Docupoint’s technology renditions the native AutoCAD DWG file format to Autodesk’s low bandwidth DWF format for fast viewing of large files, even over low speed Internet connections.

Docupoint’s SmartZoom™ opens each drawing file and automatically zooms to the SEARCH'd text occurrences within each drawing, jumping from each location to the next, etc. The proper zoom is also applied to each occurrence so that the searched text is readable.

User-definable templates allow for further customization of search results. DrawingSearcher also supports customization of the portal interface, such as for creating links to drafting procedures, department contacts and industry specific websites.

Finally, Docupoint designed DrawingSearcher to be not only easy to install, but a virtually “zero maintenance” solution. Initially, DrawingSearcher automatically builds a database for all documents in the locations specified on a network. Subsequently, DrawingSearcher automatically detects incremental additions, changes and deletions, and updates the index accordingly.

For more information, including downloading a free full-version copy of the software, see Docupoint’s Web site at www.docupoint.com.