Hi Fenton,
Thanks a lot for responding to my question on the forum.
It's a bit difficult for me to explain ***technically*** what exactly I need
to do.
I am brand new to AutoCad, and I don't completely understand what I need to
do, programmatically.
The fellow I met with yesterday is preparing a statement of work, which will
better layout, in detail, what I need to do technically.
What I can do is explain what needs to be accomplished.
My client is a surveying company that has thousands of drawings.
When they plot a drawing, they need to charge the printing costs back to the
job.
The jobs are recorded in a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database.
They are using Plotminder (
www.cadfx.com/pmind) currently, but need a more
customized solution.
If you take a look at this screenshot
of Plotminder, you will see that there is a small additional dialog that
appears at the bottom of the Autocad plot dialog.
This is the functionality I need to replace, but with the following changes:
1. All four entry fields (Job, Media, Plot Type, and Comment) will be
combo boxes that will be populated from the MSSQL database
2. Business rules (and a table within the database) will determine
whether the print job is billable
3. Not sure I need to do this, but I wonder if, based on business
rules, I can disable the OK button for plotting
4. When the user clicks on the OK button to plot, a variety of data
(the four fields plus a bunch of other data relating to cost) will be
inserted into a table in the database
5. Other data will include size of the drawing, print area
(width/height), plotter selected, and metatags/attributes that are part of
the drawing.
6. The surveying company will be moving up to a newer version of
Autocad, probably 2014.
I'm wondering if there is a small example of how I can integrate this
functionality into Autocad.
A basic "hello world" intro that would allow me to create a dialog box with
one combo box populated with three values, say "Andrew, Bob, and Chris".
I develop in C# in VS 2010. All the backend database work I can do with my
eyes closed.
The central issue in my mind is how do I "integrate" this into Autocad. My
first question may be a bit silly, but here it is: What kind of VS project
will I create in order to get started? "Windows Forms Application", "WPF
Application", "Console Application", "Class Library", or "WPF Browser
Application"?
Any suggestions, and pointers are most appreciated.
Richard
cid:image001.jpg@01CE7E41.C3647DC0
