Category: Autocad .Net API

Normally creating order forms are a nightmare.

How does everyone else create order forms?

I have no idea how people do it. They would have to manually count/iterate through every single block which exists in the model space and simultaneously note down the parts’ associated panel number(s). They could do it on their PC, or they could do it on paper. And the worst part is, is that it would distract them from doing some real work. (Or work that they would rather be doing).

Trust me – I’ve been doing monkey work like this since I was a kid. Counting panels, counting beams, counting parts: it really is a crime against humanity. Not only is it painfully tedious, it’s error prone: it’s like trying to count the stars in the sky: it is very easy to lose count, to lose your place, or to make mistakes.

Automatic Order Forms Demo – The power of the Autocad API customisation

The power of the Autocad .Net API breaks the back of it for you. I begged the head boss to let me release this to the public, just to give you an idea of the cool things that the API can do. I now present to you automated order forms: no more counting. No more errors. All done in less than 5 minutes (as opposed to five hours).

This is a code block from my award winning BlockUtility static class.. But you would want to create the selectionFilter according to your own requirements – hence I have not used a static class for getting the selection filter. Apologies for the lack of readability in my code. The blog just kills the formatting.

What do we want to do?

1. We want to prompt the user to select some objects on the screen.
2. And we want to select only certain objects using a selection filter and
3. we want to place all the filtered objects in a selection set.

And Viola! You now have your selection set which you can use to further read and manipulate Autocad objects!