Through the Interface

Getting the type of an AutoCAD solid using .NET

Now this may seem like a very trivial post, but this was actually a significant problem for my team when preparing the material for the Autodesk Component Technologies presentation we delivered at last year's DevDays tour. Basically the "type" (or really "sub-type") of a Solid3d (an AcDb3DSolid in ObjectARX) is not exposed through ObjectARX and therefore neither is it exposed through the managed interface. It is possible to get at the information from C++ using the Brep API, but this is currently not available from .NET (and yes, we are aware that many of you would like to see... Read more →

Displaying a progress meter during long operations in AutoCAD using .NET

It's often desirable to show a progress meter during lengthy operations. Although there's currently no public API to make use of AutoCAD's progress meter from .NET, there are nevertheless a couple of approaches to doing so. In this post I'll show how to do this using P/Invoke (using some code borrowed from Fenton Webb, from DevTech Americas) and in my next post I'll show how to use the "internal" AutoCAD managed assembly. Here's the C# code that uses P/Invoke, which should work for AutoCAD 2007 and 2008: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace ProgressMeterTest { public class Cmds... Read more →

Using a jig from .NET to multiply insert AutoCAD blocks - Part 2

In the last post we looked at a jig that can be used to add block references to an AutoCAD drawing. This post extends that code to support annotative block definitions (available from AutoCAD 2008) and blocks with attributes. Thanks once again to Holger Steiner for the jig class and to Roland Feletic for posting the code to support annotative blocks. A comment on the previous post asked about having attributes visible during the jig process: unfortunately that's not currently possible, as the existing managed AttributeCollection implementation wraps the version of the AcDbBlockReference::appendAttribute() ObjectARX function that requires the block... Read more →

Using a jig from .NET to multiply insert AutoCAD blocks

A big thanks to Holger Seidel from CADsys for proposing this topic and providing the bulk of the code. My main contribution - aside from some minor edits - was to implement the logic in the "BJIG" command to allow selection of the block and then loop to multiply insert it. The jig definition is almost entirely Holger's. The below C# code essentially implements a streamlined "multiple insert" command, without the options to scale or rotate the block (this would be very simple to add, of course). The code was written for AutoCAD 2007-2008. The only change you should... Read more →

Creating a partial CUI file using .NET and loading it inside AutoCAD

I started to address this topic during this previous post, but it seemed like it was worth coming back to. This time I'm looking at a different technique: to create our own partial CUI file programmatically using the Autodesk.AutoCAD.Customization functionality, save it to disk and then make sure it's loaded at the beginning of every subsequent AutoCAD session. I'm not going to focus on adding menus etc. into AutoCAD's list - that's left for a future post - this is mainly about the logic needed to make sure a CUI is created and loaded. Here's some C# code I... Read more →

Automating batch printing of DWF files using Design Review 2008

We sometimes receive questions on how best to automate the printing of DWF files. Autodesk Design Review 2008 now has a new Batch Print Plug-in enabling just this. Once you've installed the plug-in, you'll be able to use the Batch Print Wizard in Design Review (on the file menu, once a DWF has been loaded). This Wizard allows you to configure a batch job for Design Review to process and save it to a BPJ (Batch Print Job) file. This BPJ (which is basically a very simple XML file) can then be used to drive the batch print process... Read more →

It's all in the context: adding a default menu to your AutoCAD application using .NET

To follow on from the last post, we're now going to take a look at adding custom menu items to the default context menu in AutoCAD. The default menu appears when the user right-clicks on the drawing but has no objects selected. This is a good place to put application commands, for instance. The approach is very similar to the previous one, although I've added some additional commands to control adding and removing the various menus in addition to relying on the module's initialization callback. Some other notes: We're not just adding a single menu item, but are using... Read more →

Adding a context menu to AutoCAD objects using .NET

It's been quite a week - between interviews for a DevTech position we're working to fill in Beijing and AU proposals (my team managed to pull together and submit nearly 60 API class proposals at the beginning of the week) life has been extremely hectic. Thankfully we're now in the middle of the "May Day Golden Week" here in China. The Chinese government schedules three Golden Weeks every year - one for Spring Festival, one for Labour Day (also known as May Day) and one for the National Day. They're basically week-long holidays formed by a few standard holidays... Read more →