Darren,
Now this is the kind of feedback that is really quite helpful! I appreciate
your phone call today to explain many of these items.
Regards,
Eric
"dhaverstick" wrote in message
news:4664433.1096979990799.JavaMail.jive@jiveforum2.autodesk.com...
> Eric,
> Thanks for your response to my post. As you can tell, I am quite
frustrated with the Mechanical API; partly due to my ignorance of Autocad
Mechanical and partly due to the API's lack of completion. It will be nice
to finally talk with someone who actually knows something about this
mysterious beast.
> At the top of my wish list for the API is a complete object model of the
McadApplication object (mcadauto.dll). A close second is better API
documentation with, perhaps, an example or two.
> So far, I have found no way to access the McadFolders collection or the
McadComponents collection so that I can iterate through a drawing's
structure. The Mcad2dStructureMgr object is listed as being accessible
through the McadDocument object, yet, when you reference the McadDocument
object the Mcad2dStructureMgr object is not available.
> To me, there seems to be a lot of functionality, with regards to the
structure browser, in the Mechanical GUI that is not accessible through the
API. Here are a few examples:
> 1) How do I programmatically select a particular folder/component view?
> 2) I can right-click on a folder/component view in the Mechanical Browser
GUI and activate it. How do I do this with code?
> 3) Let's say I have a drawing that contains a bunch of empty structure
(components and folders with no entities in them). How do I programmatically
delete that structure?
> 4) How do I iterate through/select all the entities belonging to a
particular folder/component view?
>
> My company currently uses an obscure CAD package that has a design
paradigm based on part structure and parent-child relationships. That
paradigm allows us to quickly and easily manipulate large chunks of drawing
stuff. It also has a very powerful built-in macro language that allows me to
do, in code, any operation that I can do manually.
> We are now in the process of switching over to Autocad Mechanical 2005
because it seemed to have the same sort of paradigm. Unfortunately, I am
having much trouble porting my existing code over to the new platform. If
this trouble is just because I'm being obtuse, please let me know (gently)
and I will study a little harder before venting again. Any help you could
give me would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Darren Haverstick
> Paul Mueller Company
> 417-575-9725
> dhaverstick@muel.com