We have programmatically identified some model objects that we want to select in the model – to attract attention to the user and to allow her to easily identify all such objects. In this particular case we will be creating some beams. And then, we will select those beams in the model. Here is a code snippet to get you started:
Consider this situation – you’re got a marking plan in front of you. You want to make sure that the ferrules in corner panels do not clash. How are you going to do that?
How would you solve the problem?
You’d have to find the corner panels, and then go to the appropriate drawing – both of them mind you – and you’d have to make sure that they are at different heights. That can get very tedious and it’s very time consuming, and more than likely, you’ll make some mistakes – because the panel elevations might not be adjacent to each other.
It’s not the easiest thing to see and compare in AutoCAD.
But now you have a tool which allows you to easily compare the heights of the ferrules in two panels, straight from the marking plan.
There’s a lot of code and logic which goes with this. Perhaps I will outline it in another blog post.
For a very, very brief description of the overall route used, you can check out the code synopsis from my sister blog here. There I post the base class and interfaces used to derive the result – but have excluded all the implementation details.
Here is the video demonstration – and yet another example of the type of technologies and innovations you will have at your disposal if you work with us:
Checking for Clashes in Starter Bars between different panels from Tek1 on Vimeo.
We’re always pushing for better, faster and more efficient.
Cover refers to the distance between the outside of a concrete structure and the reinforcement. Perhaps see this from the diagram below:
There needs to be a minimal distance between the reinforcement bar and the outside of the panel.
“(Q1) It appears that one of the lapped bar is bent while the other isn’t. Or is it just a drawing convention problem?”
(Q2) I don’t get why the lapped bars have to be positioned differently when placed on the top vs at the bottom in order to ensure that the concrete thickness will not reduce, as stated in the figure. My thought is that both positioning ways occupy the same volume.
The answer to this question is best understood by studying the below diagrams:
(A1) When I draw reinforcement, I do not add a lot of the essential details which are assumed to be standard workshop practice. We are required to maintain a minimum cover. The diagram you have posted above is an example of what actually occurs in practice (but is almost never drawn that way). The reason it is bent is to ensure that the minimum cover requirements are not compromised.
(A2) That is absolutely correct – the panel’s thickness will not be reduced, but the thickness of the cover will change, depending on how one places the “reo” (reinforcement) rods.
So I’ve just managed to run AcCoreConsole – some script. And it’s changed some settings. And now when I open regular AutoCAD, when I type in netload – it seems that I’ve lost the ability to open/select things using the user interface. Now I have to manually type out long file names into the command line which is the height of tedium.
It happened because we were not meticulous in the running of our AcCoreConsole scripts. We should be sure to ensure that we save settings properly so that when users use the regular AutoCAD program, they don’t have to reconfigure the entire environment away from what works well for AcCoreConsole, back to what they are normally used to.
You can file the problem by typing in:
That should change those settings back to normal.
Don’t forget to return it to the original settings: anything beginning in a semi-colon is a comment and will not be executed.
You can see a gif of it in action above.
A commenter had some trouble loading the files. So perhaps the AcCoreConsole is confusing people. So here is a post which will hopefully clarify how to do it.
It’s quite simple:
It works exactly the same as in AutoCAD – the UI version. But remember you cannot call any commands which make use of Windows forms or WPF. It is strictly command line only. So things like APPLOAD are not going to be very effective in the AcCoreConsole.
Here is an example that you can download.
The same is pasted below if you feel uncomfortable in downloading it:
;; Comments can go after the semi colon
(princ “\nPRINC TO COMMANDLINE BY LOADING/EVALUATE THE *.LSP FILE!”)
(princ “\nNow we define a lisp-defined AutoCAD-Command called ‘HELLOWORLD’”)
(princ “\nAutocad-command HELLOWORLD is defined NOW”)
(princ “\n HelloWorld loaded, start HELLOWORLD with command: HELLOWORLD or with (c:HELLOWORLD)”)
(princ)
(defun c:HELLOWORLD nil
(princ)
(princ “\n Hello World!”)
(princ)
)
I modified it from a file kindly posted by someone in the AutoCad forum. Remember to save it with a .lsp extension!
Type in the following in AcCoreConsole:
(load “C:\\Users\\Koshy\\Downloads\\DownloadedCode\\HelloWorld.lsp”)
Of course – you will substitute the path to the file as it appears in your computer.
In AcCoreConsole type in:
(c:HELLOWORLD)
or alternatively:
HELLOWORLD
So I get some phone calls the other day – people complaining. They want changes. Yet again! Why can’t these people make up their minds! That means I have to get off Facebook, go back to my code – which I hopefully haven’t forgotten, and I have to try and make their changes fit in, with the least amount of trouble.
They wanted to dimension bolts not just to one grid line, but to every single one. Ok that’s fine. How am I going to select all parallel gridlines, given an input of just one gridline?
Now we extract the relevant points given the above information.
We’ve got the bolt dimension (previous post). We have some grid line dimensions (see above code). Add the above points to the bolt positions and then create those dimensions as outlined in the previous post. Voila! We are finished! Now back to WoW!
While writing the above AutoCAD plug-in, I faced a small conundrum in the below code:
The short answer is yes. The transaction object implements IDisposable. So, finally you can trust that the transaction will be disposed, and that any objects that it opens will also be similarly disposed.
I had a peak into the Dispose methods using Reflector. I didn’t see any automatic committing of any transactions – so I am venturing to say that no, the transaction will not be committed. In other words, we’ll have to restructure the above code to ensure that the transaction is committed before we issue the returning statement. Perhaps the AutoDesk team should abort a transaction if it is not committed before a transaction is disposed?
So the lesson is: (i) always be sure your transaction is being committed, and (ii) a using statement obviates the need to ensure that your transaction is actually being disposed of.
There is a nifty little command – little oft used in Tekla. The “Copy Object To Object” command. It’s handy, but it could be made better: all the model objects have to be selected individually. That can be a little bit of a pain. In this lesson we will create some code, using the Open API, to allow users to select multiple objects (all at once) by which the copy object to object command can be applied to.
Where is the pertinent Call in the API? I’d prefer this type of thing to be a method on the relevant ModelObject. But it’s static method in the Operation class. Here is the hello world example, straight from the documentation:
This is fantastic! Now let us outline what we want the command to do:
We can use the Picker class, located in the Tekla.Structures.Model.UI namespace. And there is a handy object which thankfully has been exposed: PickObjects(Picker.PickObjectsEnum, String). This returns a ModelObjectEnumerator which we can iterate over.
You can get the source object in the same manner as the above code – except you would use the PickObject method instead of the PickObjects (plural) method.
We can use the same method used in step 1.
The rest is as easy as A-B-C:
…That’s all folks. Hope you learned something!
What we want to do is to select and dimension all the bolts to a particular grid line. Here’s how it should work:
* The user selects a group of bolts.
* The user selects a gridline.
* Dimensions are drawn from the Bolts to the Gridline.
But quelle surprise – the Tekla API doesn’t expose an object which can select or pick multiple drawing objects.
We’ll we’re gonna have to be a little creative. Thankfully, Trimble have exposed the ability to programmatically obtain drawing objects. Given these objects we need to somehow filter out the stuff we want to dimension. Here are some possible ways:
Warning – I no longer recommend this approach because it is very, very difficult to actually select a bolt. A better approach would be to select a point, and programmatically filter to get the grid line you want.
Please refer to the below diagram.
The things that you see in the drawing, are not exactly what you can see on the model. They are drawing representations of what you see in the model. If you want specific geometry based information concerning what you see in the drawing you must:
1. First get the drawing object (i.e. the drawing representation you see as a Bolt in the drawing).
2. Then you must get that same Bolt in the model.
3. You must then inquire in the model about the particular attributes or positional properties of that bolt – which is represented as a bolt in the drawing.
4. You must also bear in mind that Views etc have their own coordinate system. So if you may need to translate any differences which exist in the model to the local coordinate system of the particular view you are using. You can set and retrieve the transformation plane like so:
5. So if you need to create some dimensions, the exact lengths etc must be derived by querying the pertinent model object representations of what you see in the drawing.
Firstly you have a Drawing class. There are many types of drawing sub-classes:
* AssemblyDrawing
* CastUnitDrawing
* GADrawing
* MultiDrawing
* SinglePartDrawing
Within each drawing is what is called the ConatinerView. A sheet is a container view. A container view is simply – if I were to use an everyday metaphor if you were grocery shopping – a bag which you can use to put: (i) other bags or (ii) shopping items inside. In order to get the ContainerView object, you can use the Drawing.GetSheet method – and you will be returned a ContainerView object.
Inside a container view you can typically:
* GetObjects()
* Or you can GetAllViews
* Or you can GetAllObjects of a certain type.
And within the container view, using some of the above methods you can get all sorts of DrawingObjects:
* DetailMark
* Dimensions etc
* Drawing representations of ModelObjects – like: Bolts, Connections, Grids, Gridlines, Parts, Welds etc.
If you put all the elements together, you can create some powerful little Plugins. I can’t post the full code because my boss will murder me, so I’ve done my best to teach you the key elements so you can create something powerful yourselves.
Here is the video demonstrating it in action:
Tekla Open API Plugin – Dimensioning all selected bolts from Tek1 on Vimeo.
Thank you for watching!
I hope you learned something from this post.
