wrote ...
> I'm wondering, because, if I distribute my application, what dll's will I
> have to include in the deployment or will I have to install the Viewer on
> the client machine too? (Which seems to defeat the purpose of a custom
> app)
It seems that you and I are working on similar projects. I'm new to AutoCAD
so I don't know how accurate my answers are, but I thought I'd mention what
I"ve discovered over the past two weeks. I think I remember something about
an ActiveX control that downloads directly into IE, but I may be confusing
that with another viewer.
> Also, I'm not familiar with the DWF format. Someone had told me it's been
> around since r13, but I've never encountered it.
Again, I don't know how accurate this is but I tend to think of DWF as a
mapping format (as opposed to a precision drawing format) so it depends on
what your requirements are.
> For the sake of highlighting or markup, can the DWF be examined
> programmatically for the drawing entities? If so, I'll assume there is an
> API for this. (No problem) Or, does the user have to save the DWG to DWF
> specifying what gets "published" and available to programmers?
You can do a lot of reading but not much writing. We just discovered that
when you use the new EPlot6 driver to export into DWF there's a new setting
to determine how to handle the layers. If it's set wrong, you won't have
access to them.
> The general task I want to accomplish, is to have users browse a database
> of drawing info and have the viewer show the drawing, or viewport, and
> highlight/markup entities depending on realtime information. (2D mostly)
Sounds a lot like my application...
My understanding is that you can only write to markup. I wanted to add small
shapes or raster images (from toolbar, drag and drop, whatever...) and link
them with data in a SQL Server, but they need to be spatially accurate when
zooming and panning.
I might not mind doing it with markup if it saves me an AutoCAD license for
every copy, but even if it can be done it started to look like a bad
workaround to me, so I started looking into ObjectARX instead. I was
somewhat hesitant because I was a little intimidated by all the ObjectARX
documentation, most of which is written in C++, but I loaded the .NET
samples today and performed 2.0 builds in VS 2005. With a small amount of
debugging they loaded into AutoCAD 2006 and they work really well.
So maybe someone from AutoCAD can confirm whether I'm right about this. Can
you program a simple application like we're describing without ObjectARX and
not have it look like a kludge?
--
Regards,
Fred Chateau
fchateauAtComcastDotNet
