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Hi Bigal, Curious if had any questions.. if my description was clear. Thanks for looking into this.

@cmc1212 did you ever get help I know I’m here like 9 months after your post it I’m stuck and getting desperate

Reading this one, what is the objection to the engineers running a LISP? You could add it as a button, in the ribbon, or as a command to suit their preferences, and if you make it easier for them they'll use it. For example a single command to draw the rectangle and insert the block instead of 3 or 4 commands makes things quicker and easier, the engineers should jump on that (every speed improvement is after all another few seconds to go and make another coffee!)

Properties 4,5,6 I can’t seem to get the right sizes or anything I saw your 2012 forum and thanks that helped me get to this point but I’m stuck now

If you use a reactor it is a lisp anyway and has to be ran every time you add the block, so as I suggested much easier to do a lisp that looks at the XY point and updates, a lisp will run through multiple blocks very fast and update all. Just make the lisp insert the block 1st.

That seems very interesting!

@PGia In case you don't mind including all the file locations you need to reference in AutoCAD's "SupportPaths" (other external paths could also be considered, but would require more code), there is another option, unorthodox but disruptive: type the name of the file to open directly into the command line (but with a small convention) I think some of the participants in this thread know what I'm talking about. If not, I'll explain it with a little code when I get home.

Don't create a new reactor for every object - this is likely to severely impact performance - only one object reactor is required with a set of owning objects. Aside, you're missing the definition for your (let*) function.

I would also vote for Everything - it's ridiculously fast.

Try Overkill

My thought exactly. It looks like an Impossible Object.

I use Everything all the time it indexes hard drives and finds a file instantly. Re Access, Word, Excel and Libre office all of these can be accessed from CAD I use Bricscad. You can for say Access not only open but actually get at the data, most common being Excel get and put. If you have a few known files you want to open all the time can either make a defun for each and load on startup or my preferred would be a sub menu in a POP menu with the file names as the description. As mentioned already using notepad is shown how in ACAD.PGP as an already defined option.

I did write something once to find and launch documents but its a little over the top probably. But Bigal also had a good suggestion , a program called everything.

Thanks to RLX for recommending Lee Mac's code (Lee Mac: thanks for sharing it) I just figured out how it works, and I think it's pretty close to what I need I guess I should create a command to run that code whenever I need it.

Thanks for the answers. They're really very interesting. And I really liked @Steven P's Lisp for searching on Google In response to Ciberangel, I must say that I often need to edit acad.lsp and other AutoCAD support files, and I really feel like I'm wasting a lot of time doing that. Additionally, I almost always need to open Access databases that contain information related to the drawings I manage. I also manage photo banks with standardized names that I need to reference on the fly in my drawings. For these reasons, a tool to search and open these files will save me a lot of time.

Didn't have the exe in the startapp line so maybe thats why?

Didn't quite work for me - opened explorer and went to a folder - not sure why yet ... actually, take away the '/watch?v....." and it works, probably just your dodgy youtube viewing habits..

@Steven P See what this does. again will use default browser. (startapp "explorer.exe" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ") So above can be (defun c:GetGoogle ( / Search Page) (setq Search (getstring "Enter Serch Term: [use '+' between terms] ")) ;; get search term, '+' between words (setq Page (strcat "https://www.google.com/search?q=" Search)) ;; google + search term address (startapp "explorer.exe" page) ) -edit didn't have the exe

I've never worked with reactors. I'll have to dig into it. Thanks!

actually quite nice Steven , think I'm gonna add this to one of my toolbars (if there's still room that is...) for opening things I also like : https://lee-mac.com/open.html

also shell commands - I've only used that once though: (defun c:GetGoogle ( / SearchTerm PageBase) (setq SearchTerm (getstring "Enter Serch Term: [use '+' between terms] ")) ;; get search term, '+' between words (setq PageBase "(command \"shell\" \"start microsoft-edge:http://google.com/search?q=") ;; google address (setq Page (strcat PageBase SearchTerm "\")" )) ;; google + search term address (eval (read Page)) ;; open 'Page' ) Guess what this does....

This will search a location for a file type, in the example searching for LISP files in c:\MyLocation\Here - remember to use a double backslash in any location, and return a list of files names + extensions (also folders if the file type is *.*). (setq myfiles (vl-directory-files "C:\\MyLocation\\Here" "*.lsp" nil)) You could do a search of this list to check if your required file is in there As MHUPP use startapp to open the file, here opens the file in variable Lispfile with notepad (startapp "notepad" Lispfile) MHUPP example was for explorer - I didn't know that method would work for any file type to open the default programme. For the first line here, your file path could be contained in a list, looping through each list item (location) until you find the file you want - could search a few locations if you knew them and want to hardcode them in the LISP, and if fails to find them there use MHUPPs 'getfiled' line for the user to select a folder or file. Use an if, cond or while loop to open the file where it finds it and stop the rest of the loop from looping

Have you looked into reactors to trigger the lisp? Never really used them didn't like the fact something is running without me knowing/realizing it. -Edit Would have to run this after ever copy or insert of a block to add a reactor to it. and i don't know how this affect the performance of the drawing.

Had a command DIR to start in the folder of the active drawing would open the save prompt like window to allow you to select the file you want. pretty sure if you feed the path to explorer it will use the default program to open the file. (defun C:DIR ( / filePath) (setq dwgPath (getvar "DWGPREFIX")) (setq filePath (getfiled "Select a File to Open" dwgPath "*" 0)) ;limit what types you see by changing "*" (if filePath (progn (startapp "explorer.exe" filePath) (princ (strcat "\nOpening: " filePath)) ) (princ "\nNo file selected.") ) (princ) ) -edit You can also hard code where it stats in like if your documents are in a network drive. (setq filePath (getfiled "Select a Spec File" "C:\\Project\\spec\\" "PDF" 0)) ;look in spec folder for all pdf's

If it's not exclusively AutoCAD files, you may be better off using a system tool. What kinds of files would you be looking for? What parameters would you be searching with? What editors would you be opening them with? The more you can tell us, the better we can help you.