After entering the command “sob” into the command line, or selecting the “SOB” button on the ribbon, the main dialog window will appear.

General Layout:

In this window you will see an area titled “DWG list”, with a button titled “Add Files” and a button titled “Remove Files”. These will be the drawings that the batch operations will be performed on.  On the right hand side there are three tabs titled “Attribute Changer”, “Plot”, “X-refs” "BOM Fixer" and "Posting Model Builder". This is where the different batch utilities are set up and run from.

Attribute Changer:

To change the attributes on a group of drawings the “Attribute Changer” tab needs to be active. In this tab there are “Parameters”, “Replace” and “Search and Replace” fields. In the “Parameters” field, there are two fields where the “Block Name” and “Attribute Tag” to be changed are specified. There is also a Button titled “Populate Fields”. In order to populate the Block and Attribute Tags from a DWG in the “DWG list” area on the left, you must select ONLY ONE DWG from the list and click the “Populate Fields” button. This will populate the “Block Names” drop down with all of the blocks that are inside of that particular drawing. Then when a block is selected from the “Block Name” drop down, the “Attribute Tag” drop down will be populated with all of the Attribute Tags for the specified Block in the DWG selected from the DWG list. You also have the ability to manually enter the Block name and Attribute tags.

*Important Note: The "Block Name", "Attribute Tag", and "Search For" values are not case sensitive.  If the drawing is open, it will not process that drawing file.

Plotting:

To plot a group of Drawings, select the “Plot” tab on the right hand side of the window. This feature is useful when plotting several ISO drawings to PDF. The name of the PDF will be the DWG name itself, along with some optional additional text. The first field is “Plot Properties”. Here is where either model space, or paper space is used to plot from. If model space is selected, it will plot the extents of the model space, with the plot style in the “CTB” field. If a layout is selected, it will plot the layout in the “Layout Name” field. The “Populate Fields” button works the same in this tab as it does for the Attribute Changer. It will populate the “Layout Name”, “Title Block Name”, and “Rev Attribute Tag” fields with the values in the drawing selected in the DWG list. 

Next is the optional “Revision Check”. This is where you can check for a revision number and add that to the PDF name, along with a prefix. 

The next optional field is “Additional Drawing Name Text”. This is where additional text can be added to the end of the PDF name (after the revision text if selected).

The last optional field is the “Advance Options”. Since Core Console is being initiated in the background, there is a set amount of time that this plugin is allowing the drawing to be processed before it kills the process. This default time is 30 seconds. If you are dealing with more complex drawings, it may take longer than 30 seconds to plot them. More time can be added with the “Additional Time Out (sec.)”.  There is also the option to use the load dbx file in core console. The reason for this is because core console is based off of vanilla Autodesk® AutoCAD®, so if you are plotting a drawing with Fabrication MEP objects, the objects won’t be shown unless the proper dbx is loaded.

The final field is the “Plot Location” that the PDFs will be plotted to.  Once this field is populated, the “OK” button is pressed and all of the settings are saved for the next time the command is started.

*Important Note: The DWGs and PDFs being processed need to be closed to successfully plot.

Detaching X-Refs:

To detach X-Refs from a list of DWGs, the “X-Refs” tab needs to be selected. It simply has the option to either detach the X-Refs that are “Attached” (not overlays) or to detach all X-Refs. If more batch X-Ref options are needed, there is a utility that already lives inside of the AutoCAD install folder called “AdRefMan.exe”.

BOM Fixer:

The BOM Fixer allows you to search and replace all tables that exist in the Drawings within the DWG list. The "Target Column" field allows for specific columns to be searched. For instance, if the second column from the left is the "Size" column, you could use "2" for the Target column if you wanted to just search and replace a specific size. If the "Search All Columns" check box is selected, all columns in all tables will be searched.

Posting Model Builder:

The Posting Model Builder will make a single model out of all objects in model space within the Drawings in the DWG list.

For more information view the post "SonOfABatch Plugin: A Multi-Batch Utility" at HouseOfBIM.com.

The installer that ran when you downloaded this plug-in from Autodesk App store has already installed the plug-in. You may need to restart the Autodesk product to activate the plug-in. To uninstall this plug-in, click Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features (Windows 7/8/8.1/10) and uninstall as you would any other application from your system.