Insert block cancels on me

[Anonymous]

Hi, I'm fairly new to visual lisp editor and I'm testing out a simple code that  finds an area of a closed polygon, creates a block attribute and inserts it with the new value:

(defun c:P_blocks(/ s a sqft area)
  (setq s (car (entsel)))
  (setq s (vlax-ename->vla-object s))
  (setq a (vla-get-area s))
  (setq sqft (/ a 144))
  (entmake '((0 . "block")
           (2 . "room")
           (10 0.0 0.0 0.0)
           (70 . 2)
          ))	   
  (entmake 
    '((0 . "ATTDEF")
      (1 . "area");value
      (2 . "room");Tag string (cannot contain spaces)
      (3 . "square footage ??");Prompt string
      (8 . "wall");layer
      (10 0.3 4.3 0.0 ) ;First alignment point 
      (40 . 2.0);
      (41 . 1.0)
      (50 . 0.0)
      (70 . 0)
      (71 . 0)
      (72 . 0)
      (73 . 2))
  )
  (entmake '((0 . "endblk")))
  
  (entmake (list
      '(0 . ".-insert")
      '(8 . "wall")
      '(2 . "room")
      '(10 0.0 0.0 0.0)
       (cons 1 (rtos sqft 2 2))
      '(41 . 1)
      '(42 . 1)
      '(50 . 0.0)
      ))

  )

 every line leading up to the "insert" routine works as follows, but when i run it, i get:

Redefining block "room"
*Cancel*
nil

Any Ideas would be much appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Wish I could help but I'm not any good with lisp. 

You might have better luck if you posted in the lisp forum though.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/visual-lisp-autolisp-and-general/bd-p/130

[Kent1Cooper · Accepted solution]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

....

....
  (entmake (list
      '(0 . ".-insert")
....
       (cons 1 (rtos sqft 2 2))
....

 ....

---

I rarely deal with (entmake), but I see a couple of things....

The period and hyphen preceding the word insert may be appropriate with a command name, but are not appropriate in an entity type name.  Try it just the way it appears if you (entget) a Block insertion:

'(0 . "INSERT")

The value of the text content of an Attribute is not an element of the Block insertion's entity data -- the Attribute is a separate entity.  [After all, a Block can have more than one Attribute, so to which of them would it assign that value?]  I'm not sure exactly how to handle that in (entmake), but I would just use (command "_.insert" ... and feed in the Attribute's text content at the end after the scale and rotation entries.  [That would also eliminate the issue in my first comment.]

[Anonymous]

this is true, I was successful in just simply using  (command ".-insert" ... sqft)  I was just curious to see if it was possible to create the same result in (entmake). Thank you for the insight!