topic Re: Get all BlockReferences in database in .NET Forum

Get all BlockReferences in database

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 18:26:41 GMT

Hi, just trying to find an efficient way of retrieving blockreferences from a drawing's database so I can explode them. Any help would be much appreciated.

Tyler

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

jtohill — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 19:44:45 GMT

That sounds like a horrible thing to want to do, and why I like to make exploding blocks difficult to do. You make have to go into all the blocks and set to allow exploding. You may be able to use qselect to then to select all blocks the explode. But I can't think of a good reason to destroy your drawing in that way. Just for discussion why do you want to do this.

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 13:08:37 GMT

Our shop's CNC mill isn't capable of reading blocks, only geometric entities. Our current export function creates a new drawing for each selected block, recreates it there, and then tries to explode it so the mill can properly read its files - right now we have to explode each new drawing manually, but doing so does achieve the results we want.

Tyler

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

jtohill — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 14:05:29 GMT

That's a better answer, try this.plot a pdf of the drawing after turning off all linework you don't need. inport the pdf using the pdf import tool. you may have to explode any plines, but this should give you a drawing without blocks, just linework.

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

jtohill — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 14:06:29 GMT

inport into an new drawing.

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 15:45:03 GMT

will that preserve the layer names of the entities? In SCM Maestro the machine reads a .dxf file's layer names to determine the proper tool to use.

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

jtohill — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 15:51:26 GMT

no it creates it's own layers.

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 15:53:05 GMT

Then that solution unfortunately isn't going to work for me... Exploding still seems like the most viable path here

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

norman.yuan — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 21:41:52 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

Hi, just trying to find an efficient way of retrieving blockreferences from a drawing's database ...

When you asking "an efficient way...", it sounds like you tried it in some way, but thought it was not efficient. You may want to explain what does "efficient" mean here.

There are a few ways to find BlockReferences in a drawing:

1. You can use Editor.SelectAll(), or other Editor.SelectXXXX() method with filter to only have block references selected;

2. You can open ModelSpace and each PaperSpace and loop through it and only deal with entities in the Model/PaperSpace, if the entity is BlockReferemce;

3. You can loop through each BlockTableRecord in BlockTable that is not a Layout block. Then for each BlockTableRecord, you call its GetBlockReferneceIds()/GetAnonymousBlockReferenceIds() to get all block references of a given BlockTableRecord.

Unless your drawing is super huge (containing millions of entities), any of the afore-mentioned approaches would not have much of difference in terms of "efficient way" of finding block references in a drawing, a fraction of second, or a second or 2 (does it really matter in your case?).

Re: Get all BlockReferences in database

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 18:07:43 GMT

Thanks so much, this helped a ton!