What is the best management practice (bmp) for assigning Unique ID to AutoCAD drawing (dwg) objects? I am preparing to use upsert (haven’t upgraded FME yet) and need to establish a Unique ID for every AutoCAD object that becomes a feature. The current workspace ingests ~300 drawings, transforms to GIS features, then writes to a single feature class in an ESRI geodatabase (gdb) file. Up until now, my focus has been on the ingesting and transformation. The current workflow simply overwrites the entire feature class every run. Now, with upsert coming, I want to refine my process to update and insert only modified features.

I understand that AutoCAD object ‘handles’ are unique to each drawings object, but I’m thinking not necessarily unique across multiple drawings. I could concatenate handle with drawing name, which would work for me currently, but could at some point be flawed, as drawings in different directories could have the same name. I have other ideas, but want to hear form the community to what works best for you.

Thanks for sharing.

Tyler

FME2021.0