Commands
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On my flight back from Singapore I started thinking about how an app might help people discover what's new in the AutoCAD UI from release to release. This might also work for custom functionality, but that's not (currently) my main concern. I was thinking of displaying some kind of palette that cycles through the new commands and features in a release, highlighting the associated ribbon buttons, etc., using the AutoCAD help system's excellent UI Finder capability. Over the weekend I started looking at how it might work – whether it was possible to call the UI Finder from an app…
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Last week we introduced the ExecuteInCommandContextAsync() method and saw it in action from a context menu click event. In today's post we're going to see how it can be used for a lot more: we're going to use it to respond to external, operating system-level events (although admittedly we're handling the event in-process to AutoCAD via .NET). What we're actually going to do is fire off a command inside AutoCAD – in our case we're going to use RECTANG to create square polylines – each time we find that a file has been placed in a particular folder (in our…
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It's time to start looking in more detail at some of the new API capabilities in AutoCAD 2016. To give you a sense of what to expect in terms of a timeline, this week we'll look at a couple of uses for DocumentCollection.ExecuteInCommandContextAsync() and next week we'll look at point cloud floorplan extraction and (hopefully) security and signing. The first use of ExecuteInCommandContextAsync() I wanted to highlight was one raised in a blog comment a couple of months ago. The idea is simple enough: we want to be able to launch a command reliably from an event handler, in our…
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After our quick look at AutoCAD 2016 from a user perspective, let's now spend some time looking at the things important to developers in this latest release. Compatibility Off the bat it's worth stating that AutoCAD 2016 is a DWG compatible release: it's using the same file format as AutoCAD 2013, 2014 and 2015. It's also a binary application compatible release: ObjectARX apps written for AutoCAD 2015 should work in 2016 and it's likely that .NET apps built for AutoCAD 2014 will work, too. That said, some changes have been made to the security model for this release of AutoCAD,…
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In this post we're wrapping up this mini-series on docking, which is part of a much broader story arc around a "command-line helper" tool, of course. But then we're reaching the end of that, too, I suspect, as the app's just about done. Hopefully it's ready for posting to Autodesk Labs, at least. Last time we added right-click dragging to allow our keywords window to be moved around without interrupting the active command. Now we're taking it a step further to preview docking at one of the four corners of the drawing window, as well as to actually dock the…
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I'm happy to say that the implementation I mentioned in the last post ended up being pretty straightforward. Which is actually great, as I have some important posts to work on for next week. 🙂 Today we're going to take a look at the next stage of the "command-line helper" implementation: basic right-click movement of the global keywords dialog, so we can set a custom location for the dialog without needing to use the KWSDOCK command. Here's the code in action: The main work for this stage was to add support for right-click, mouse move and right mouse-button up events,…
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Today we're going to look at the implementation talked about in the last post: we're going to see how it's possible to use the Application.PreTranslateMessage() method to hack AutoCAD's message-loop and basically convert typed keywords into global ones. This is actually pretty neat (yes, even if I do say so myself 🙂 and frankly I'm surprised it works. Here's the overall approach: Track the characters typed into the command-line Add individual characters into a list Backspace removes the tail of the list Arrow-keys invalidate the tracking: if the user accesses entries in the command-history we can't deal with that, and…
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This post carries on from this series from a couple of weeks ago: Adding a global keyword menu to AutoCAD using WPF – Part 1 Adding a global keyword menu to AutoCAD using WPF – Part 2 Enabling global commands on localized AutoCAD versions using .NET The overall goal behind these posts was to create a "command-line helper" tool to make it easier for people who know the English version of AutoCAD (or an AutoCAD-based vertical) to work with a corresponding localized version. Basically because some people learn AutoCAD using an English version – perhaps during their studies – but…
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Here's a quick piece of code to finish up the week to complement what we saw earlier. The idea is that on localized AutoCAD versions this code will allow the user to enter English commands without needing the underscore prefix. The code works by detecting an "unknown" command and then attempting to execute it again after prefixing an underscore to launch a global command. Which may or may not work, of course, so we certainly need to set a flag to avoid descending into an infinite loop of commands being called while prefixed by an ever-expanding legion of underscores. Aside…
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After introducing this project in the last post, now it's time to share some code. The project, as it currently stands, contains three source files: the first one relates to AutoCAD – it implements the various commands we'll use to attach event handlers to tell us when to display (or hide) keywords and the other two files relate to the UI we'll use to display them. We're going to use an invisible window which has a child popup containing a listbox of our keywords. Here's the application in action – for now in English AutoCAD, as that's what I have…