Does anyone out there use unnamed, empty (or emptyish) groups in AutoCAD?

Jul 30, 2010

AutoCAD's Product Design team are considering the possibility of automatically removing unnamed groups that are either empty or only contain a single item. The question, though, is whether anyone out there is for some reason relying on the existence of such groups, and consequently whether we would therefore be risking breaking applications or customizations should we choose to auto-purge them.

So… do you have an application that uses unnamed groups with 0 or 1 items? I don't have a firm idea of why anyone would do this, but then I'm often surprised by the innovative ways people find to implement custom functionality in AutoCAD. 🙂

Please post a comment or send me an email.

Update

It turns out the plan is only to auto-purge *unnamed* groups containing 0 or 1 items (this was missing from my original post, I have now adjusted the language, above).

5 responses to “Does anyone out there use unnamed, empty (or emptyish) groups in AutoCAD?”

Paul Munford

July 30, 2010 at 10:31 am

It would be great to have the option to explode multiple groups at once, and even better to be able to see the No. and type of entities in a group before you explode it. Once expoloded, the empty groups could be cleared up with the 'PURGE' command...

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Alex Fielder

July 30, 2010 at 1:23 pm

We use a tool called AutoXLSTable that can have only one item (usually a polyline) in each group - it's functionality is used to create a Bill of Materials.

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Stephen Preston

July 30, 2010 at 9:47 pm

Alex - Are they unnamed groups? (I saw you'd posted this before Kean's update).

Thanks,

Stephen

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Alex Fielder

July 31, 2010 at 1:33 am

Hi Stephen,

I don't think they're unnamed groups. (It's because they have names that the program can find and count/measure them.)

Thanks for the heads-up though.

Cheers,

Alex.

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Steve Johnson

August 2, 2010 at 6:39 am

I have an old but important routine that attempts to process objects and in the event an object cannot be processed, it places that object in a group. At the end, it informs the user about the group so they can decide what to do with those objects. (There's just one group for all failures, not one group per object). The group could contain just one object if only one can't be processed. It's a named group, though, so purging empty or single object unnamed groups wouldn't have an effect here.

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