Purge Appearances and Materials

<?xml encoding=”UTF-8″>By Adam Nagy

When you use an Asset, whether it’s Material or Appearance, it gets copied into the document and can be accessed from the following properties of the Document object:
– AppearanceAssets
– MaterialAssets
– Assets (both Appearances and Materials)

If you want to get rid of unused items (i.e. purge the assets collection in the document) then you can just iterate through the items in the collections and remove the unused ones (where IsUsed = False).
Note: there might be connections between the assets in which case you have to iterate through them multiple times, until all the items stay used.

Sub PurgeMaterialsAndAppearances()
Dim doc As PartDocument
Set doc = ThisApplication.ActiveDocument
' There can be references between assets,
' so keep doing it until only used things remain
Dim foundUnused As Boolean
Do
foundUnused = False
Dim a As Asset
For Each a In doc.Assets
If Not a.IsUsed Then
a.Delete
foundUnused = True
End If
Next
Loop While foundUnused
End Sub

This is what we start off with in the document and what we end up with after running the above code: