Accessing DWG data outside Autocad...

[ChaosInACT]

The company I'm at has a document control piece of software - it's really being used largely to batch plot.

Anyway, they've built it from VBA, then gotten it "converted" to VB.net. Its a bit of a mess. It loads in a dwg, then sweeps the whole directory (including the loaded dwg) for meta data. Lots of issues - it seems to me running this OUTSIDE of Autocad makes way more sense. I don't need preview information and Autocad will be on every machine, but do I need to use RealDWG to attack it that way?

[matt.worland]

Hopefully this post can assist:

http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2007/07/accessing-dwg-f.html

Please double check, but I believe that if you have a license of AutoCAD on that machine you do not need to utilize RealDWG.

[ChaosInACT]

Great, always good to have options at the start of research!!

I also found this:

http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2012/02/the-autocad-2013-core-console...

which I'm looking into 🙂

[StephenPreston]

Using an existing batch processing application may save you a lot of time. Here's one of several blog post related to Script Pro 2 to get you started -

http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2012/04/batch-purging-of-drawing-files-using-scriptpro-20.html

[ChaosInACT]

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@StephenPreston wrote:

Using an existing batch processing application may save you a lot of time. Here's one of several blog post related to Script Pro 2 to get you started -

http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2012/04/batch-purging-of-drawing-files-using-scriptpro-20.html

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I'm looking into that, but I really need to establish 2 way communication from vb.net with the object...this is more a "full blown ui-driven document manager that happens to batch print to pdf". situation...

They had something that operated from inside vba doing it, ported it to vb.net with a guy that has never used autocad, and wonder why it doesn't work. I think it's just easier to rebuild...if I could build a ui interface too the the acadcore thing it would be perfect - any attempt to use the acad.exe object is rather exenisve but I may have no choice....