Through the Interface

Unmerging cells in an AutoCAD table using .NET

A question came in, last week, via a comment on this post. Daniel wanted to unmerge the title cells of a table: Very nice tutorial. based on this I manange to create the VB. NET code for my table style, but I face with a problem that I could not change the Title to be unmerged. In this moment, as default, it is merged and I want it to have it not merged. What is code for this ? I tried to find it out by ts.SetCellClass(RowType.TitleRow, MergeCellStyleOption.None but is not working. i get error on: sd.UpgradeOpen() line I... Read more →

Adding a symbol overlay to an AutoCAD table cell using .NET

While my last post on tables was apparently interesting, it turns out it didn’t actually address the question that inspired it. Oh well. Here’s a recent comment that gave greater clarity on the requirement: Do you know those no smoking signs commonly seen in public places: a cigarette with a red cross struck through it. Can a similar thing be done programmatically in a table with the strike through happening through a number. A picture is worth a 1000 words: http://imgur.com/gallery/qPzEm... In other words, can a block be inserted into a particular cell which already contains a number value?... Read more →

Adding a new column to an existing AutoCAD table using .NET

After the last post, where we saw some code that creates an AutoCAD table based on the blocks in a drawing, in this post we’re going to modify our table, adding a new, initial column that numbers the contents. Here’s what we want to create using our new MBT command: Here’s the way the command looks when it runs: And, finally, here’s the updated C# code with our new MBT command: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; namespace TableCreationAndModification { public class Commands { const double rowHeight = 3.0, colWidth = 5.0; const double textHeight = rowHeight... Read more →

Creating a table of AutoCAD blocks using .NET

This post – and the one to follow it – were inspired by a comment on this old post (which in many ways is quite similar to this one, just using an older syntax and starting with a static array of table data). We’re creating a table with information about the various blocks in the block table of the current drawing: in this post we create the basic table containing the table name and its thumbnail, while in the next post we’re going add some additional (and as-yet-to-be-determined) information. The basic point is to show how to manipulate an... Read more →

Adding a context menu item with an icon for a specific AutoCAD object type using .NET

To follow on from yesterday’s post, today we’re going to look at an alternative implementation that – rather than modifying the Edit shortcut menu that appears for all object types – adds our custom menu item to the shortcut menu associated with a specific type of object. In our case we want to associate the menu item we introduced yesterday with Table objects. The way to associate shortcut menus in CUI with a particular object is to add an alias with “OBJECT_{DXFNAME}”: in our case {DXFNAME} will be ACAD_TABLE, making the alias “OBJECT_ACAD_TABLE”. You can also add an alias... Read more →

Adding a context menu item with an icon in AutoCAD using .NET

A big thanks to Parrish Husband for both suggesting this topic and providing the majority of the code in this post. Parrish had been attempting to extend the technique shown in this aging post to include an icon with the content menu item. At least one person had done this before, according to the blog comments, but had found – just as Parrish did – that the added icon didn’t line up with the others in the menu. In fact it completely messed up the alignment of all the other icons in the menu: less than ideal behaviour. So... Read more →

Exporting an AutoCAD table to a Unicode CSV using .NET

A colleague in our Product Support team came to my desk yesterday afternoon with a problem he thought I might find interesting. He was right. :-) It turns out that AutoCAD tables containing Unicode characters don’t export very well to CSV files (for later import into Excel, for instance). Here’s a sample table with a number of Unicode characters in it: When exported to a CSV file using the standard right-click menu option it contains a bunch of ? characters: The good news is that it’s easy to create your own version of the TABLEEXPORT command – the one... Read more →

Inserting a cell range from an Excel sheet as an AutoCAD table using .NET

I wasn’t planning on covering this particular topic today, but then this comment came in overnight and I ended up taking a look into it. Paul has been trying to append a specific cell range to his connection string when creating a data-link for an Excel spreadsheet, adding to the code from this previous post. I gave it a try myself with a hardcoded cell range and it seemed to work fine, and so went ahead and modified the implementation of the TFS command to ask the user to enter their own cell range. What’s probably most interesting about... Read more →

Inserting a specific Excel sheet as an AutoCAD table using .NET

Last week I received the following question from Adam Schilling: I have enjoyed your posts on .net programming for datalinks. I have searched high and low and haven’t been able to find answers or any support to help me with a small issue. My code (much of which was based off of your posts from 2007) works fine, except I cannot get it to use a different sheet from the workbook that is select. Since the option to select a specific sheet is available when adding a link manually, I would think that it would be possible to programmatically... Read more →

Stripping formatting from AutoCAD tables pasted from Excel using .NET

I’m back in San Rafael after a tiring – but very rewarding – two days down in Santa Cruz. I’ve decided to rattle out a quick post – inspired by this recent comment – before heading out for dinner, so I hope my brain isn’t playing tricks on me when it says the code’s good enough to post. Please do let me know if you see anything wrong with it. Here’s the question: Kean, I am wondering how to do this on table objects. When importing a table from excel as pasting special ACAD objects, you can reset the... Read more →

Handling protocol changes to AutoCAD’s table in .NET

This question came up, from our friends over at The Swamp: I have been re-building some old code in VS2010 using the 2012 ObjectARX SDK and came across some 'blablabla is obsolete: use thingy instead' warnings. The code still compiles and runs fine but I want to start thinking about the future. a few examples will follow, please add any others you come across. […] The next was to do with the Table Class i.e. Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices.Table In fact, there are a myriad of obsolete warnings in the Table class ... some of them appear to have no documented resolution,... Read more →

Copying rows between AutoCAD tables using .NET

Thanks to Marat Mirgaleev, a member of our DevTech team based in Moscow, for the code that inspired this post. The code in this post implements the simple case of taking the last two rows of one table and copying them into the same relative position in another table. If the destination table is smaller, it gets expanded, as do the individual rows and columns. Other than that, there’s not much to it. I have tried to structure the code to make it easy to adapt to more “challenging” tasks, such as taking an arbitrary, rectangular selection of cells... Read more →

More fun with AutoCAD tables and their styles using .NET

In this previous post we saw some code to create a table style and apply it to a new table inside an AutoCAD drawing. While responding to a comment on the post, I realised that the table didn't display properly using my example: the first column heading was being taken as the table title and the rest of the column headings were lost - the headings in the table were actually taken from the first row of data. I suppose that serves me right for having chosen such eye-catching (and distracting) colours. :-) The following C# code addresses this... Read more →

Creating a custom AutoCAD table style using .NET

The question of how to define a new table style programmatically has come up a couple of times over the last week or so, so this post shows how to approach this. I've used the code from this previous post as a basis for this post's. The important thing to know is that TableStyle objects are stored in a special dictionary, which can be accessed via a Database's TableStyleDictionaryId property. This ObjectId property allows you to access the dictionary, from which you can query the contents, determine whether your style exists and add a new one if it doesn't.... Read more →

Updating an Excel spreadsheet from a linked AutoCAD table using .NET

In the last post we saw some code to update an AutoCAD table linked to an Excel spreadsheet. In this post we go the other way, updating an Excel spreadsheet from a linked AutoCAD table. Here's the C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows; namespace LinkToExcel { public class Commands { [CommandMethod("T2S")] static public void UpdateSpreadsheetFromTable() { Document doc = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument; Database db = doc.Database; Editor ed = doc.Editor; PromptEntityOptions opt = new PromptEntityOptions( "\nSelect table with spreadsheet to update: " ); opt.SetRejectMessage( "\nEntity is not a table." ); opt.AddAllowedClass(typeof(Table), false); PromptEntityResult per =... Read more →

Updating an AutoCAD table linked to an Excel spreadsheet using .NET

Thanks to Viru Aithal, from DevTech India, for providing the code for this post (I converted the C# code below from some C++ he had sent to a developer). In the last post we showed how to create a table linked to an Excel spreadsheet using .NET in AutoCAD 2008. AutoCAD does a great job of looking for changes in the Excel spreadsheet, and asking whether you want to update the linked table: There may be times, however, when you want to force the update programmatically, whether from the spreadsheet to the table ot vice-versa. In this post we'll... Read more →

Creating an AutoCAD table linked to an Excel spreadsheet using .NET

In the last post I promised to tackle this issue, and so here we are again. :-) Note: the code in this post relies on enhanced table functionality introduced in AutoCAD 2008, so please don't get frustrated trying to make this work in previous versions. The following C# code follows on from yesterday's, taking the spreadsheet selected by the user and linking it to a newly-created table in the active AutoCAD drawing. I haven't bothered with line numbering in the below code, as it follows on almost exactly from the code shown last time (aside from renaming the namespace,... Read more →

Creating a table of block attributes in AutoCAD using .NET - Part 2

In the last post we looked at some code to create a table of attribute values for a particular block. In this post we'll extend that code and show how to use a formula to create a total of those values. Below is the C# code. I've numbered the lines, and those in red are new since the last post. The complete source file can be downloaded here. Firstly, a quick breakdown of the changes: Lines 60-81 deal with user input, and the forcing of the decision to "embed" rather than "link", if we're performing the total (table formulae... Read more →

Creating a table of block attributes in AutoCAD using .NET - Part 1

This post was inspired by suggestions from a few different people (you know who you are! :-). I'm going to take it in two parts: this post will focus on creating a table automatically that lists the values of attribute references included in block references in the modelspace that point to a particular block table record selected by the user. Phew. The next post will add some functionality to create a "total" of one of the columns in the table we create, by using a table formula that performs a sum of the appropriate cells. The below code is... Read more →

Embedding fields in an AutoCAD table using .NET

This post is in response to a few requests I've received to show how to embed fields in tables. It follows on from this previous post, where we looked at how to embed a block preview icon in a table. The technique I'm showing in this post is far from being specific to tables, however. You could very easily use it for any other text object that supports fields inside AutoCAD (MText, Text, Attributes, etc.) Fields are very cool objects: they allow you to access a very wide array of information and embed them inside textual objects in AutoCAD.... Read more →