Lisp and support for VLAX functions in 2012

[mdhutchinson]

Is there still support in AutoCAD 2012 Visual Lisp for VLA and for VLAX functions?

[Kent1Cooper]

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@mdhutchinson wrote:

Is there still support in AutoCAD 2012 Visual Lisp for VLA and for VLAX functions?

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[Does anyone have it yet, to be able to answer?]  There is a 2012 Product Launch "virtual event" coming up:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=16353133&siteID=123112

It will apparently have opportunity to ask questions, so you might get an answer by registering for that.  Or poke around the site -- there may be some kind of features listing that would give you an answer.

[martti.halminen]

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@mdhutchinson wrote:

Is there still support in AutoCAD 2012 Visual Lisp for VLA and for VLAX functions?

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Yes, seems to exist in AutoCAD Mechanical 2012, so presumably in other variants, too.

- There is even some new documentation (at least compared to 2010, I don't have 2011) regarding how to construct

 the calls from Lisp. Still relies partially on the VBA and ActiveX Reference, though; that is installed on the disk, but not (at least easily, I didn't find it) directly accessible from the Help dialog.

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[Caduser_zero]

im giving 2012 the 30 day test run and i see vlax, vlr but no vla commands in the developer help reference.

[dgorsman]

You wouldn't, since the particular methods and properties available would be specific to the ActiveX object in question e.g. vla-get-Endpoint would work for AutoCAD objects while it wouldn't do anything for the MSXML interface.  I think for now the best we can hope for is an up-to-date object model with the applicable methods and properties, along with any notations where the Visual LISP implementation may differ from "normal" e.g. specifying quoted symbol names for output-only method arguments.

[Kent1Cooper]

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@Caduser_zero wrote:

im giving 2012 the 30 day test run and i see vlax, vlr but no vla commands in the developer help reference.

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I would take that to mean that yes, there is still support for VL.... functions of the various types, just as there is in earlier versions.  My 2004 supports (vla-....) functions, even though it only has documentation in the AutoLISP Reference for (vl-...), (vlax-...) and (vlr-...) functions [and perhaps not all of those].  The Developer's Guide talks about (vla-...) functions and how to choose and use them in a sort of indirect way, but doesn't have what I wish it did -- the kind of entries for them that the AutoLISP Reference has, with syntax and arguments and all.  But despite the difference in documentation, they are nevertheless supported.  Since it looks like 2012 has similar documentation, I would assume they are still supported there.  And since the Subject line is about VLAX functions specifically, it seems that category is covered in 2012, even if some other categories may not be.

[wkiernan]

You might want to run the C:GETVLS function I posted the other day  in

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Visual-LISP-AutoLISP-and-General/vl-function-listing/td-p/2109110

for a list of all the vla-* functions in AutoCAD 2012.  As I mentioned in that post, in AC2007 there exist ActiveX methods (and corresponding vla-* functions) which are not even listed in the ActiveX documentation; the only way I could figure out what the arguments were for the totally undocumented vla-* functions was to look at acadi.h, which is supplied in the ObjectARX SDK.

If you aren't interested in ObjectARX (or whatever they call it these days) but only in ActiveX or Visual LISP and all you want is that one headerfile, it would seem kind of like overkill to download and install the entire SDK; however, Autodesk might not appreciate it if I uploaded just that one file to this forum.  If there are any moderators reading this, what do you think?  It could be a big help for ActiveX/Visual LISP users if they could look at the declarations for otherwise undocumented ActiveX methods.