Through the Interface

Creating a selection filter that finds dynamic blocks in AutoCAD using .NET

An interesting question came in via email from Rob Outman. He’s interested in applying a selection filter when the user selects dynamic blocks. This is straightforward for unmodified dynamic blocks – just as with standard blocks, you can filter on the block name very easily – but it works less well on dynamic blocks whose properties have been modified at an instance level. Essentially what happens is this: if you select a block reference to a dynamic block in the AutoCAD editor and then use (for example) the Properties window to edit some of the custom properties associated with... Read more →

Gathering points defining 2D AutoCAD geometry using .NET

The reason for this post may be obvious to some – probably those who are doing this kind of analysis already – and less obvious to others – who will have to wait for the next post to see why it’s helpful. :-) I won’t ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say that for various types of spatial analysis it’s helpful to acquire first points from geometry. This post attempts to do that for 2D geometry, and hopefully deals with a few of the trickier cases related to rotated text and such-like. For this particular task I chose... Read more →

Painting properties between dynamic AutoCAD blocks using .NET

In the last post we looked at some code that essentially dumped out the dynamic properties of dynamic blocks to the command-line. In this post we take it a step further and capture the properties from one dynamic block reference and attempt to apply them to another. We're going to apply slightly different logic, depending on the situation... If the block references refer to the same dynamic block definition (i.e. their DynamicBlockTableRecord property contains the same ObjectId) then we'll assume they have the same dynamic properties in the same order. So we'll go through and attempt to copy the... Read more →

Accessing the properties of a dynamic AutoCAD block using .NET

This is one of those funny scenarios... I was just thinking about what to do for my next post - whether to dive into some new features of AutoCAD 2010 (which I will do soon, I promise! :-) or whether to choose something from my ever-increasing to-do list, when I received two emails. One was from our old friend Fernando Malard, suggesting a topic for a blog post, and the other was from Philippe Leefsma, a member of our DevTech team in Europe, in response to an ADN members question. It provided some code that could eventually form the... Read more →