Through the Interface

Purging DGN linestyles from drawings not open in the AutoCAD editor

This request came in a few weeks ago regarding the source code for the recently posted DGN clean-up tool: Would you modify the tool so that it can be processed by the equivalent figure ObjectDBX (of course for AutoCAD, not RealDWG)? I would like to give the Database object to the function, and the tool would have to process them in batch (a tool for loading drawings on my side). It seemed like a reasonable enough request, so I spent some time putting together a version of the code that can be used on non-editor resident drawings. I changed... Read more →

Extracting MRU information from AutoCAD using .NET

Inspired by the Windows 8 conference I attended on Monday, I’ve decided to build my first Metro-style application which scrolls through AutoCAD’s Most-Recently-Used (MRU) drawing list. I now have a barebones installation of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview + VS11 Beta inside a Parallels VM on my Mac, but rather than installing AutoCAD into that, I decided to write a simple exporter on my existing Windows 7 machine (which now has AutoCAD 2013 installed) to generate the data for my Metro-style application. Let’s start by looking at what file-oriented MRU data AutoCAD stores, and where. At the end of... Read more →

The AutoCAD 2013 Core Console

In the first of this week’s posts on the new, developer-oriented features in AutoCAD 2013, we’re going to take a look at the AutoCAD Core Console. I predict that this one feature alone is going to be worth its weight in gold to many customers and developers. Picture this: a stripped down version of AutoCAD – but only from a UI perspective – that can be executed from a standard Command Prompt. We’re talking about a version with almost all the capabilities of full AutoCAD – with the ability to load certain applications and execute scripts – but launches... Read more →

Generating preview images for all blocks in an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

This was a nice little solution I saw provided recently by Viru Aithal from DevTech India. It’s a simple command to open a drawing and generate preview icons for each of the blocks it contains. It forces an icon to be generated – when it doesn’t already exist – via Viru’s old trick of using InvokeMember() to call IAcadDocument::SendCommand() via COM (which is synchronous, where Document.SendStringToExecute() is asynchronous and only executes once the command has completed). Viru’s trick allows him to call SendCommand() without creating a dependency on the AutoCAD Type Library (something developers often prefer to avoid, as... Read more →

Customizing ScriptPro 2.0 to process drawings not present in the AutoCAD editor

It’s time to wrap up the series on batch-reporting Registered Application IDs. For reference, here’s how we got to where we are today: Implement a command to collect RegAppId information for the active document Extend this command to work on a drawing not loaded in the editor Save our RegAppId information to some persistent location (XML) Transform the resulting XML file to HTML using XSLT Create a modified version of ScriptPro 2.0 (one of our Plugins of the Month) to call our command without opening the drawing The broader point of today’s post – other than simply to deliver... Read more →

Transforming a list of RegAppIds from XML to HTML using XSLT

As raised as a possibility at the end of the last post, I did choose to throw together a quick XSLT stylesheet to generate an HTML report of the XML data created by our XRA command. To enable this I did make a few changes to our command implementation, which we’ll take a look at first. Here’s the updated C# code, with new/modified lines in red (and here’s the updated source file): 1 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; 2 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; 3 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; 4 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; 5 using System.Collections.Generic; 6 using System.Text; 7 using System.Xml; 8 using System.Xml.Serialization; 9 using System.IO;... Read more →

Persisting RegAppId data from an external AutoCAD drawing to XML using .NET

This post takes the code from the last post and extends it to serialize the collected RegAppId data to an XML file, as per Step 3 below: Implement a command to collect RegAppId information for the active document Extend this command to work on a drawing not loaded in the editor Save our RegAppId information to some persistent location (XML) Create a modified version of ScriptPro 2.0 (one of our Plugins of the Month) to call our command without opening the drawing I’ve chosen once again to leverage the very handy XmlSerializer class to handle serialization to and from... Read more →

Counting the RegAppIds for the active AutoCAD drawing and its external references using .NET

Many of you will be aware of what has been referred to as the “RegAppId virus”: drawings that have been unfortunately polluted with excessive Registered Application IDs – which are used by applications to attach XData to entities – have these RegAppIds brought into a main drawing when Xrefed, duplicating and duplicating IDs that were often redundant in the first place. In fact – back in the day – I remember a very popular 3rd party application (which has long since been fixed and shall remain nameless) that erroneously used to create hundreds (if not thousands) of these IDs... Read more →

Combining AutoCAD blocks in separate files into a single DWG using .NET – Take 2

Thanks for Chris, Dan and Dale for pointing out the obvious issue(s) with my last post. Let’s just blame it on a few holiday cobwebs needing brushing away during the first week back in the saddle. :-) The main issue with my previous implementation was that I’d somehow forgotten that Database.Insert() allows you to insert into a named block definition. This simple function does all my previous, manual approach did and more. The secondary issue – but still very important to those using annotation scaling – is that the previous code does not work for annotative blocks, as Dan... Read more →

Combining AutoCAD blocks in separate files into a single DWG using .NET

Important note: the code in this post – while potentially interesting, at a certain level – has been superceded by the code in the following post. Please go ahead and use that simpler, more complete implementation instead. This question came in, over the holidays, that seemed like it was worth addressing: How do I get an external DWG into the blocks table as a block definition? I started by quoting this ancient (at least in terms of this blog) post, but it turned out only to be of partial help: the problem is that the external DWG does not... Read more →

November’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: ScriptPro 2.0 for AutoCAD

As mentioned previously, Viru Aithal, from DevTech India, has been working hard on a replacement for the venerable ScriptPro tool. I’m delighted to say that it’s now ready, and is live on Autodesk Labs as November’s Plugin of the Month. Viru took the codebase he developed for the DWF/PDF Batch Publish tool and created ScriptPro 2.0, written from the ground up in C# and developed without any dependency on a specific AutoCAD version. Viru’s approach uses the equivalent of late binding to call into AutoCAD through COM and so doesn’t require a specific AutoCAD Type Library. Which means the... Read more →

SortOnVersion in F#

I had a very nice surprise in my inbox, this morning. Thorsten Meinecke, from GTB in Berlin, decided to convert the VB.NET code contained in the last post into an F# script and to share it with this blog’s readership. Thanks, Thorsten! :-) One thing about it being an F# script (typically stored in a .fsx file) is that it can be loaded and executed directly from the “F# Interactive” (FSI) component in Visual Studio without the need to build it into a project creating an executable. What’s also very nice is that the XAML defining the WPF dialog... Read more →

SortOnVersion & ScriptPro

A friend in our Product Support team in Neuchâtel asked me to help develop a little application to sort drawing files on disk. He has some old Clipper scripts that he used during a previous life as a CAD Manager to sort drawing files into different folders based on their version (held in the first six bytes of the DWG file, as mentioned in this previous post and this post of Shaan’s). We decided I’d implement it in VB.NET, to make it easier for him to understand and extend. The application is simple enough, but could make a mess... Read more →

March’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: Batch Publish for AutoCAD

I’m very pleased to announce the availability of this really interesting Plugin of the Month over on Autodesk Labs: Batch Publish for AutoCAD. Here’s an excerpt from the ReadMe (which I happen to have written, but anyway): This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of publishing sets of drawings to DWF and/or PDF. It runs as a command within AutoCAD – as opposed to a separate executable – and uses a separate executable to monitor AutoCAD's health and restart it, as needed. The status of the batch publishing operation is stored to disk, allowing it... Read more →

Batch-processing AutoCAD drawings from LISP without SDI (take 2)

In this recent post we looked at an approach combining AutoLISP with a script generated on-the-fly to get around the fact that (command "_.OPEN" …) does nothing when SDI == 0. As mentioned in a comment in the post, I realised that the approach of using a single master script to do this is more prone to failure: a number of commands can cause scripts to stop executing, for instance, so it would be better practice to minimise the operations contained in a particular script to increase the application’s fault tolerance. This modified approach was suggested by a member... Read more →

Batch-processing AutoCAD drawings from LISP without SDI

As mentioned in this previous post, there has been some discussion internally around the future of SDI. Given the change this will bring to applications, SDI is going to be around until we next deliberately choose to break binary application compatibility (something we just did with AutoCAD 2010 and typically try to do only every three releases). That said, SDI is very likely to go away at some point, so it does seem worth drilling further into the reasons for using it and trying to determine an appropriate way to remove current dependencies on it. Thanks to all of... Read more →

Interfacing an external COM application with a .NET module in-process to AutoCAD (redux)

Thanks to all of your interest in this recent post, which looked at a way to interface an out-of-process .NET application with an assembly running in-process to AutoCAD. After some obvious functionality gaps were raised, Renze de Waal, one of our ADN members, pointed out a DevNote on the ADN website covering – and more completely addressing – this topic. Shame on me for not checking there before writing the post. Anyway, onwards and upwards… The information in the DevNote highlights some of the problems I and other people had hit with my previous code, mostly related to the... Read more →

Batch conversion between DWF and DWFx

Over on Beyond the Paper, Volker Joseph has posted a DWF Toolkit console application that can be used to batch-convert between the DWF and DWFx formats. Read more →

Purging registered application names from a folder of AutoCAD drawings using .NET

In the last post we looked at some code to programmatically purge Registered Application names from the drawing currently active in AutoCAD. In this post we take the "batching" code first used in this previous post and apply it to this problem. What we end up with is an additional command called PF which asks the user to specify a folder and then purges the RegApps from the DWGs in that folder, saving those files that end up being modified with the "_purged" suffix. One point to note is the use of the Database.RetainOriginalThumbnailBitmap property: as we're not making... Read more →

Updating a specific attribute inside a folder of AutoCAD drawings using RealDWG from .NET

This post finally takes the code last shown in this previous post, migrating it to use RealDWG to update a folder of DWGs without the need for AutoCAD to be installed on the system. A big thanks to Adam Nagy, a member of DevTech working from our Prague office, who turned around my request to convert the code to work with RealDWG in a matter of hours (if not minutes). Firstly I need to make it clear that this code will not run without both RealDWG installed (I'm using RealDWG 2007, as the file format didn't change between 2007... Read more →