Is it possible to map an AUTOCAD Attribute prompt rather than the AUTOCAD attribute Tag to the FME Input Attribute for the purpose of extracting AutoCAD block data.

Hi @lesleymacmahon​,

Can you try exposing the autocad_attr_def_prompt attribute in the reader and let me know if you see the values there? According to our DWG reader documentation, that attribute should hold the prompt information.

Hi @jovitaatsafe​ ,

Thanks for your reply. I have tried exposing the autocad_attr_def_prompt attribute in the reader and it comes up as <missing>. I have followed the instructions to create the workspace in the tutorial at https://community.safe.com/s/article/autocad-dwg-block-attribute-extraction. What I was hoping for is that instead of using the fme_attrib_info{}.field_name and fme_attrib_info{}.field_value list pair I could use a .prompt_name and field_value pairing. The problem that I have is the autocad drawings block tag names haven't been populated correctly with hyphens for a tag name multiple times. The problem exists in many of the client's drawings so the drawings can't be corrected. I would be grateful if you can help in anyway. Thanks

Hi @lesleymacmahon​,

I am also getting <missing> values in my test on the autocad_attr_def_prompt attribute which seems incorrect to me. I’ve filed a problem report tracked internally as (FMEENGINE-71065) for our development team to investigate further on it and I’ll let you know as soon as it has been addressed. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other way to read in the prompt at the moment.

Hi @jovitaatsafe (Safer)​ ,

Thank you for raising this issue with the development team, please let me know what they find.

Thanks,

Lesley

Has this been resolved, as I am looking to do the same, extract the prompt values to replace my field_names which are nicer and also will make it easier to match up 

Hi ​@a.bertagna,

Unfortunately at this time, the functionality to retrieve the attribute prompt values is still unsupported. Our development team are aware of it but there is no timeline for an implementation. The reader currently doesn't expose the read-only prompt values reliably so it's not yet possible to extract or map block attribute prompts directly through FME.

For now, the best approach is to continue using fme_attrib_info{}.field_name and fme_attrib_info{}.field_value list attributes as outlined in the AutoCAD DWG Block Attribute Extraction article. You could potentially try the Data Extraction tool within AutoCAD, as referenced in this documentation, to export block attribute information to a CSV file, which then can be brought into FME for easier reference and mapping alongside your DWG block data.

I've added your interest on the existing FMEENGINE-71065 report so our development team is aware that this functionality would be valuable to more users. It would also help to submit this as an Idea on extracting block attribute prompts so other FME Community users can upvote it. Our product team reviews them to assess impact and it helps prioritize future development.

Thanks for following up on this!