Back in a much earlier post we looked at some code to access the pickfirst selection set. I thought I'd now take a look at the more specific case of defining a command that adds entities into the current pickfirst selection set. Here's some C# code I used to do this, with comments describing its behaviour. The most interesting point is that once we get the contents of the existing pickfirst set we then clear it and rehighlight the entities manually, to give the user a graphical clue of the previous contents. using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime;…

OK, I have to admit I feel a bit cheeky making a separate post out of this one, but then I did promise our friends at TheSwamp that I'd post this additional code, once more provided by Sreekar Devatha in response to an ADN support request. The code is basically the same as that in my last post. The only change is that after we reverse the list of containers we don't go and add in the selected entity. Which means that when we get our path it stops at the container of the selected entity, not the entity itself.…

I'd like to thank two people for this post: Kerry Brown, an ADN member in Australia and regular contributor to TheSwamp, pointed me to a response he'd received from a member of the DevTech team in India, Sreekar Devatha. So thanks to both Kerry and Sreekar for providing the material for this post. The problem was to highlight the nested entity returned by the Editor.GetNestedEntity() method. Sreekar's solution was to create a sub-entity path through the nested block structure, and use that to highlight the entity in question. To create the sub-entity path he retrieved the containers of the nested…

This entry was contributed by an old friend who recently rejoined the ADN team, Jeremy Tammik. Jeremy has been in and around the Autodesk family for many years - he actually delivered the first ever ARX training in San Rafael, back when it was still called ARX - and I'm very pleased he chose to rejoin our team earlier this year. It also happens to be Jeremy's birthday this coming weekend (on Sunday 26th November), for anyone who's interested. 🙂 The question came in from an ADN member and revolved around the need to select objects at a particular location…

Many AutoCAD commands that work on sets of entities support two styles of working: verb-noun or noun-verb. This basically means that if the user has pre-selected a set of entities (the "noun") and then launch the command (the "verb") then the command will not need to request the user select them. This is enabled using something called the pickfirst or implied selection set inside AutoCAD. To take advantage of this feature inside your commands the first thing to do is to use a special command-flag called "UsePickSet": this tells the AutoCAD editor not to clear the pickfirst set when the…