Exploding blocks with autolisp

Show us what you have so far.

You say you are fairly new... It would be much better to learn about blocks and how use them rather than explode them. Blocks are much much much more useful and speed enabling than the entities they are made of.
I've been at it for 23 years (Intergraph in 1983, then AutoCAD in 1989) and the top two mistakes new users make are xref bind, and explode. There are excellent ways to get them to do what you need without ever doing either.

Perhaps a little more backround information would help. I work for an engineering firm, and we receive background drawings from the architect that we xref into our drawings. It has become increasingly dificult to use their drawings without editing the somewhat, so we are trying to create a lisp routine to do the editing for us. What we need to do is get set everthing to bylayer for color, remove all unnecessary xrefs, and set all layers to a specific color. As for exploding the blocks, it is dificult for us to freeze the layers we dont need in our drawings if there are blocks in the arch. backgrounds. For example, if the architect has a standard room block, we cant use our express tools to freeze the furniture, it will freeze the entire block (usualy on layer 0). Granted, we will run into the same problem if everything in the block is on the same layer, but that is rare.
As for what I have so far, I have this:
(defun c:test () (setq ss (ssget "x" '((0 . "insert"))) c 0) (repeat (sslength ss) (command ".explode" (ssname ss c)) (setq c (1+ c))) )
I dont have any of the layer or xref commands in yet, but those I know how to do and will add them later when I get this part working.
Henry C. Francis wrote:

That should explode every block in the drawing, unless they've on locked and/or frozen layers.
Some of the express tools used to have Options prompt which can affect what gets turned off. Do you get an Options prompt with whatever you're using?

I am using layfrz, which does have some options, but that is not usualy a problem. Something I forgot to mention is that we need everything to be by layer for color, so we can set it to the color we want in our drawings. We do this to make everything plot with a light lineweight. If a line in a block is set to any color but by layer, we cant change it in our drawing. If I explode all the blocks, I can then use change to make everything by layer. The routine I have will explode the bound xref I have in the drawing, then stop. When I run it again, it explodeds most of the blocks, than prints "Select object:" "Command: 94" to the command line.
Michael Bulatovich wrote:

I have a routine that I use for that specific purpose here: is free as are all the routines listed here:

Thanks everyone for your help, I think I have a routine put together that will do what I need.
Henry C. Francis wrote: