topic Re: Will SelectWindowPolygon and SelectCrossingWindow work in a headless AutoCAD environment? in .NET Forum

Will SelectWindowPolygon and SelectCrossingWindow work in a headless AutoCAD environment?

santhoshr151194 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:07:00 GMT

I'm building an application that needs to run both in interactive AutoCAD and in headless/cloud environments such as the Design Automation API or accoreconsole.exe.
One of the core requirements is efficiently selecting entities within specific polyline boundaries, especially when working with large and complex drawings.

Specific Questions:
- Are SelectWindowPolygon and SelectCrossingWindow supported in headless AutoCAD environments like Design Automation API or accoreconsole.exe?
- If they are supported, are there any known limitations or behavioral differences compared to running them in an interactive AutoCAD session?
- What are the best practices for implementing entity selection in a way that works consistently across both interactive and headless environments?

At the moment, I'm using a fallback approach that iterates through all entities in ModelSpace and performs manual geometric bounds checking, but it's considerably slower for large drawings. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.

Re: Will SelectWindowPolygon and SelectCrossingWindow work in a headless AutoCAD environment?

ActivistInvestor — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:32:57 GMT

No they will not work in a headless AutoCAD setup because they require a display. They use display information to select objects, so if there is no graphical view they will not work.

Re: Will SelectWindowPolygon and SelectCrossingWindow work in a headless AutoCAD environment?

daniel_cadext — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 23:27:59 GMT

iterating is faster than select all. You could probably get pretty good results if you optimize your code. Getting all the objects in a 2d extents should be very fast

Re: Will SelectWindowPolygon and SelectCrossingWindow work in a headless AutoCAD environment?

442884080 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 16:33:36 GMT

I’m developing a .NET add-in that runs on accoreconsole.exe, and I’m using SelectCrossingWindow() to process DWG files.
With some drawings it works fine, but with others it just returns Error.
I don’t see any difference between the files, so I’m not sure what the issue is.